Ogg on the Rise

Also available in Spanish, Ogg en crecimiento.

Visit PlayOgg.org and share your favorite Ogg Friendly sites

The recent launch of Stephen Fry's film in celebration of GNU's 25th anniversary has been a success on a number of levels — including for PlayOgg.org , the campaign for free audio and video formats. Worldwide, people have reached out to thank us and offer their support, including dozens of volunteers who have translated the film into over 24 languages. For free software users, streaming the Fry film in Ogg Theora is a joy. One reason for this is that the video will first attempt to play using the users's free software media player of choice, but, even if that fails, the video will stream through the free software Cortado Java Applet.

We borrowed this way of doing things (plus the code itself) from the Wikimedia community, who uses it throughout a number of projects, including Wikipedia. (Special thanks to Gregory Maxwell for helping us with the video and directing our attention toward the Cortado player). In fact, more and more sites are starting to stream Ogg Theora for video, with and without Cortado. Recently, DailyMotion.com released a channel for OLPC XO users to share and exchange Ogg Theora videos at http://olpc.dailymotion.com, and the Metavid project out of the University of California Santa Cruz maintains a large archive of videos of the US Congress in Ogg Theora at http://metavid.ucsc.edu.

And things are looking up on the audio front as well, with more and more sites casting Ogg Vorbis streams and downloads. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has been streaming Ogg for quite some time (CBC Radio 1, 2, and 3), as well as Germany's Deutschlandradio. More recently the U.S. National Public Radio station affiliate, WBUR Boston has begun streaming Ogg Vorbis. And, after a brief visit to New Zealand last August by Richard Stallman, we received word from Radio New Zealand that they had begun providing Oggcasts of much of their programming.

Ogg is on the rise and this is good news for end-users everywhere, but the really good news is that we expect things to get even better. With Mozilla's recent announcement of adding native Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis support to their browsers, we expect many more sites will begin streaming Ogg. So, we need your help in collecting as many Ogg Friendly sites as we can so that we can add them to our RSS feed of Ogg Friendly sites on PlayOgg.org. If you know of any sites we do not have listed, please email a link and a short description of the site to campaigns@fsf.org.