Ogg Vorbis multimedia file format

Ogg Vorbis audio compression format is roughly comparable to other formats used to store and play digital music, such as MP3, AAC, and other digital audio formats.

Ogg is an open, patent-free multimedia container format designed for efficient streaming and manipulation by the Xiph.Org Foundation.

Ogg is the name of container format for audio, video, and metadata. Files ending in the .ogg extension may be of any Ogg media file type, and because the format is free.

Vorbis is the name of a specific audio compression scheme that is designed to be contained in Ogg. Ogg's various codecs have been incorporated into a number of different free and commercial media players as well as portable media players from different manufacturers. Such as FLAC or Speex for example.

History of OGG naming

It is often erroneously assumed that the name Ogg comes from the character of Nanny Ogg in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Rather, it derives from ogging, jargon that arose in the computer game, Netrek. Originally meaning a kamikaze attack and later, more generally, to do something forcefully possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. At its inception, the Ogg project was thought to be somewhat ambitious given the power of the PC hardware of the time.

Popularity of Ogg Vorbis files

Although Ogg hasn't reached anywhere near the ubiquity of the MPEG standards (MP3, AAC, etc), it is commonly used to encode free content and has started to be supported by a significant minority of digital audio players. Many popular game engines also support the Ogg format, not the least of which have been the Doom 3, Unreal Tournament. The more popular Ogg Vorbis codec has built-in support on many software players and extensions are available for nearly all the rest. Other codecs are less well supported although extensions are often available.