Fortunately, most widely distributed videos and audio files (from news sites, for example) are created
using a few commonly used codecs.
While there are some commonly used encoding standards, there are also a slew of proprietary codecs
in use today as well. This is really a battleground of sorts with each vendor/developer trying to produce
the superior standard and obtain the spoils of market share that can follow. For the end user,
this means you might have to spend time chasing a variety of playback utilities to handle multiple
video and audio formats.
Another debate: Can digital media match the quality of analog formats? This hardly seems much
of a question anymore because DVD has shown the potential for high-quality digital video, and
MPEG codecs have made huge strides in digital audio fidelity. The quality of digital media files is
very high and getting better all the time. Some of the key technologies that reflect improvements
in how audio and video codecs have improved include:
Ogg Vorbis??”This audio codec has been developed as a freely available tool??”no
patents or licensing needed. Ogg is the ???data container??? portion of the codec, and Vorbis
NOTE
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Running Applications Part IV
is the audio compression scheme. There are other compression schemes that can be used
with Ogg such as Ogg FLAC, which is used for archiving audio in a lossless format, and
Ogg Speex, which is used specifically to handle encoding speech.
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