I don’t know how I missed this one. As a follow up to Real’s embrace of open source, Real and Xiph have teamed up to have Real’s new player, the Helix™ DNA Client, support the truly open source Ogg Vorbis audio codec. Per their press release, “Ogg Vorbis is a non-proprietary, open, patent and royalty-free, audio format and codec for mid to high-quality audio at fixed and variable bitrates for delivery over the Internet.” Which is something that RealAudio, WindowsMedia Audio, Quicktime and mp3 most certainly are not.
Simply, this is a good thing, since it will greatly expand the number of people who will be able to easily listen to Ogg Vorbis enoced audio, especially royalty-free music which is increasingly being offered in the ogg format. Right now, listening to ogg encoded stuff requires looking a little harder for an ogg-capable player, although the new version of Winamp plans to offer support. But, arguably the average user is more likely to have RealPlayer (now Helix) than almost any other player, save Windows Media. For Real, this is obviously a defensive maneuver to make their player all things to all people, and for fans of a true open-source audio format, it means that you have a potentially greater audience for the stuff you encode and distribute.
(and, don’t forget that the mediageek radio show archives are now available in ogg vorbis, too!)
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