Ogg

The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents[3] and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality digital multimedia.

[4] The Ogg container format can multiplex a number of independent streams for audio, video, text (such as subtitles), and metadata.

The audio layer is most commonly provided by the music-oriented Vorbis format or its successor Opus.

Ogg is derived from "ogging", jargon from the computer game Netrek, which came to mean doing something forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources.

[4][failed verification] At its inception, the Ogg project was thought by the authors to be somewhat ambitious given the limited power of the PC hardware of the time.

[9] The "Ogg" bitstream format, designed principally by the Xiph.Org Foundation, has been developed as the framework of a larger initiative aimed at producing a set of components for the coding and decoding of multimedia files, which are available free of charge and freely re-implementable in software and hardware.

It has since been adopted in the specifications of Ogg encapsulations for other Xiph.Org codecs including Theora, Speex, FLAC and Opus.

[9] The software was originally named Squish but due to an existing trade mark it was renamed to OggSquish.

[9][17][18][19][20] In 2001, OggSquish was renamed to Ogg and it was described as "the umbrella for a group of several related multimedia and signal processing projects".

OGM was initially supported only by closed source Windows-only tools, but the codebase was subsequently opened.

Independently, the Matroska container format reached maturity and provided an alternative for people interested in combining Vorbis audio and arbitrary video codecs.

[23] Today, video in Ogg is found with the .ogv file extension, which is formally specified and officially supported.

[24] Although Ogg had not reached anywhere near the ubiquity of the MPEG standards[25] (e.g., MP3/MP4), as of 2006[update], it was commonly used to encode free content (such as free music, multimedia on Wikimedia Foundation projects and Creative Commons files) and had started to be supported by a significant minority of digital audio players.

Also supporting the Ogg format were many popular video game engines, including Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Halo: Combat Evolved, Jets'n'Guns, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, Myst IV: Revelation, StepMania, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Lineage 2, Vendetta Online, Battlefield 2, and the Grand Theft Auto engines, as well as the audio files of the Java-based game, Minecraft.

On May 16, 2007, the Free Software Foundation started a campaign to increase the use of Vorbis "as an ethically, legally and technically superior audio alternative to the proprietary MP3 format".

On March 3, 2010, a technical analysis by an FFmpeg developer was critical about the general purpose abilities of Ogg as a multimedia container format.