Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality digital multimedia. Its name is derived from "ogging", jargon from the computer game Netrek.
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis.
Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It was developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container.
Dirac is an open and royalty-free video compression format, specification and system developed by BBC Research & Development. Schrödinger and dirac-research are open and royalty-free software implementations of Dirac. Dirac format aims to provide high-quality video compression for Ultra HDTV and beyond, and as such competes with existing formats such as H.264 and VC-1.
Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Lossless data compression does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as Advanced Audio Coding, MP3, Vorbis, and Opus. Therefore, it may be decompressed to a file that is identical to the source material.
Xiph.Org Foundation is a nonprofit organization that produces free multimedia formats and software tools. It focuses on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Vorbis, an open and freely licensed audio format and codec designed to compete with the patented WMA, MP3 and AAC. As of 2013, development work was focused on Daala, an open and patent-free video format and codec designed to compete with VP9 and the patented High Efficiency Video Coding.
xine is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. xine is built around a shared library (xine-lib) that supports different frontend player applications. xine uses libraries from other projects such as liba52, libmpeg2, FFmpeg, libmad, FAAD2, and Ogle. xine can also use binary Windows codecs through a wrapper, bundled as the w32codecs, for playback of some media formats that are not handled natively.
GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, and exports them in another. The formats and processes can be changed in a plug and play fashion.
Sound Juicer is the official CD ripper program of GNOME. It is based on GTK, GStreamer, and libburnia for reading and writing optical discs. It can extract audio tracks from optical audio discs and convert them into audio files that a personal computer or digital audio player can play. It supports ripping to any audio codec supported by a GStreamer plugin, such as Opus, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and uncompressed PCM formats. Versions after 2.12 implement CD playing capability. Last versions produce lossy formats with default GStreamer settings.
libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data.
Α video codec is software or a device that provides encoding and decoding for digital video, and which may or may not include the use of video compression and/or decompression. Most codecs are typically implementations of video coding formats.
Banshee was a cross-platform open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it used the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players, including Apple's iPod, Android devices and Creative's ZEN players. Other features include Last.fm integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the MIT License. Stable versions are available for many Linux distributions, as well as a beta preview for OS X and an alpha preview for Windows.
Brasero is a free and open-source disc-burning program for Unix-like operating systems, it serves as a graphical front-end to cdrtools, cdrskin, growisofs, and (optionally) libburn. Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Moonlight was a free and open source implementation for Linux and other Unix-based operating systems of the now deprecated Microsoft Silverlight application framework, developed and then abandoned by the Mono Project. Like Silverlight, Moonlight was a web application framework which provided capabilities similar to those of Adobe Flash, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment.
The HTML5 draft specification adds video and audio elements for embedding video and audio in HTML documents. The specification had formerly recommended support for playback of Theora video and Vorbis audio encapsulated in Ogg containers to provide for easier distribution of audio and video over the internet by using open standards, but the recommendation was soon after dropped.
OggConvert is a free and open-source transcoder for digital audio and video files of various types into the free Ogg Vorbis audio format, and the Theora, VP8 and Dirac video formats. It supports Ogg, Matroska and WebM containers for output. It is developed by a single author, primarily for Linux. A number of community translations exist for the software.
The HTML5 specification introduced the video element for the purpose of playing videos, partially replacing the object element. HTML5 video is intended by its creators to become the new standard way to show video on the web, instead of the previous de facto standard of using the proprietary Adobe Flash plugin, though early adoption was hampered by lack of agreement as to which video coding formats and audio coding formats should be supported in web browsers. As of 2020, HTML5 video is the only widely supported video playback technology in modern browsers, with the Flash plugin being phased out.
GNOME Videos, formerly known as Totem, is a media player for the GNOME computer desktop environment. GNOME Videos uses the Clutter and GTK+ toolkits. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10, but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments. Totem utilizes the GStreamer framework for playback, though until version 2.27.1, it could alternatively be configured to use the Xine libraries instead of GStreamer.
Opus is a lossy audio coding format developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force, designed to efficiently code speech and general audio in a single format, while remaining low-latency enough for real-time interactive communication and low-complexity enough for low-end embedded processors. Opus replaces both Vorbis and Speex for new applications, and several blind listening tests have ranked it higher-quality than any other standard audio format at any given bitrate until transparency is reached, including MP3, AAC, and HE-AAC.
