Make Ogg Portable

A reader writes: "Taken from a post on http://www.hydrogenaudio.org "I got help from the fine folks over at the Gentoo forum to find you. I have been talking with jazPiper, one of the makers of portable MP3-players, and they was very interested in getting support for Ogg Vorbis. However, they had trouble finding a user base for this product. I will of course point their attention to these forums, but I hope you will help me convincing them by signing the petition, saying support for Ogg Vorbis in a portable device makes it more attractive. So please go here and sign it!" Another petition to sign!"

Just make them look

[PinkX]

At this or any other thread here on slashdot mentioning the need for a portable music player with OGG support!

Not enough information

[0x0d0a]

Without any sort of price range, all they're going to get is people saying "Yeah, I'd like a vorbis player...I'd get one." Few people can make a reasonable judgement without some idea of the cost.

I mean, is this going to cost more than a Zaurus?

I'd probably get one if it was less than $200, but probably wouldn't if it were more than $300. The features certainly play a role -- is this CD-based? Flash-based? HD-based? What kind of interface? Do we get Linux mass storage device support for uploading music?

These are pretty critical.

I can say that I'd be more inclined to buy a vorbis than an mp3 player.

Re:Not enough information

[hey!]

The less storage, the more ogg makes sense. If you have a full sized CD, then I think it there is little to recommend using ogg because you can store plenty of music in MP3 format. For mini-CDs, I've found I'd like to get a bit more on them, maybe 20-30%.

Last time I was in the market for a portable player, there were these cute little flash based systems that had 32MB of storage. This is simply not enough to bother with ripping and downloading to make it worthwhile. With ogg you probably could get a whole CD down to one of these things at reasonable quality. I'd definitely spring for a tiny ogg player with 64MB of storage.

Re:Not enough information

[espresso_now]

At work I have 344 songs compressed with ogg to 64kbps and mono. Sounds fine considering I have both speakers stacked on top of each other so stereo would be useless anyways.

Average filesize: 1.6 MB.
Total Archive Size: 537
Number Of Files: 344

(And yes, this is all stuff I have purchased NOT dowloaded:)

too much storage is never enough!

[timothy]

hey wrote: "The less storage, the more ogg makes sense. If you have a full sized CD, then I think it there is little to recommend using ogg because you can store plenty of music in MP3 format."

Depends what 'plenty' is :)

Especially in the car, the more the merrier -- I'd like have as many hours of reasonably high-quality sound as I can on a single CD-R. You're right that it's even more crucial when storage space is small to start with, but I'd like (for instance) to be able to use ogg files (all on one CD-R) rather than cassette tapes when I listen to endless episodes of CarTalk or whatever. Audiobooks, too -- some of them run very long, and the fewer disks involved, the better.

timothy

Weak Market ...

[zangdesign]

Getting them to commit to a product based on ogg is a very risky business, especially if it's based on the reader base of Slashdot.

If you figure that /. has a million individual readers, then only a small percentage of those are going to have the money or the interest in purchasing a portable ogg player, which means that the production run is a one-time thing with very little chance of permanence.

The market might build over time, but by then the company owuld probably have gone under. They should save their money until ogg is at least as big as quicktime or avi.

C'mon, just 200 signatures?

[Baikala]

This must be a realy slow day, I would have expected an slashdoted vorbis site and what i found? just 200 signatures!
I know the /. comunity can bring more heat than that.

Ogg on Consumer Electronic

[Mas3]

I hope this leads to an Ogg support on Consumer Electronics generally. Like on DVD-Players (which just support mp3 now).

--
Stefan

DevCounter [berlios.de] - An open, free & independent developer pool
created to help developers find other developers, help, testers and new project members.

inclusion of ogg, not exclusion of [x]

[timothy]

Yes, electronics margins can be very thin (look at the cost of an iPod vs. the cost of the included hard drive sold separately), but the cost of adding ogg to a portable player I would guess to be well under $5 in bulk. (Yes, that number is grabbed randomly, but I have heard people talk about figures from $0.50 to $2.00, so I hope it's safe ;)).

And contrary to a few of the other comments here already, this doesn't mean "basing one's business on Ogg" -- it just means making it an available feature. If no one ever uses it, it would be a bad idea, but it would disable any other features already inherent to a given device. That is, an MP3 player with ogg capability added in (from iRiver?! :)) will still be an MP3 player to anyone who ignores the Ogg part of it.

Considering all the little-used formats which seem to be crammed into the chips on even the lowest-grade DVD players (percentage wise, not that many people use VCD/SVCD, and I'll bet heavily that most people's MP3-capable DVD players have never been used for that purpose), adding ogg seems like a no-brainer.

Even if it's only included to make the feature list look better, I'll take it! ;)

timothy

self-reply, hit Submit too fast!

[timothy]

That's "would *not* disable any other features inherent to a given device" of course.

Sigh.

timothy

Iriver.com

[wynlyndd]

(Disclaimer: I do not work for them)

Iriver seems to be working with emmett of Xiph.org to add Ogg support to their products.

BTW, the Slim-X rocks.

Grammar

[jyasskin]

*sigh* You'd think a petition would be check fur grammar. It looks like these too were run threw a spell-checker set too auto-accept it's guesses.

(btw: 6 intentional mistakes)