One thing that has been annoying me for a while is that I can’t find an car stereo that plays oggs. Most of the things that I want to listen to in the car are in ogg format. Thats LUG Radio, primarily, but also pretty much every Linux CD ripper rips to oggs. They rip to MP3 too if you have the plugin and I do, but I would prefer to use the non-patent encumbered ogg format. Ogg is quite popular in the hobbyist media area as far as I can tell. I have a friend that uses oggs for his work and he’s not a Linux user at all.
Why does nobody make a car stereo that plays oggs? OK first up, the market demand probably isn’t that high, but the ogg codec is free and unencumbered by patents, which means they can put it in without any legal restictions.Ogg also offers the best audio quality for file size ratio. Why the fuck don’t they? If you’re developing a device that uses MP3, WAV and WMA then it’s pretty trivial to include ogg. I want it and I’m sure many other people do.
Apple don’t support ogg because they say they don’t see any demand from their users, well I have an iBook and I want ogg support. I also want a car audio player that does.
The reasons I have come across are these:
- Most people don’t use oggs so it’s not important
It’s completely free to use and gives users another option. More to the point it creates more market for the manufacturers. Certainly for smaller manufacturers it would boost sales.
- Because hardware vendors fear that the only people who use oggs are freeloading music and video pirates.
This isnt the case in my experience at all, I’ve never encountered pirated material in ogg format. So far as I am aware pirated material is normally in MP3, MPEG, WAV and AVI format.
- Probably nearer the truth is the possibility that most manufacturers are put off as content can’t be protected by DRM when using the ogg format, which means Apple won’t go near it and sooner or later, neither will Microsoft or any other fee paying download service.
Let’s think of this one another way. MP3 has the market for portable media players and In Car Entertainment. There are ‘MP3 players’ which play oggs. Not iPods or Creative or anybody else like that, but there are a number which do including devices from Teac, Iomega, Saumsung, LG and Freecom. The illegality of doing tape to tape copying didn’t stop many manufacturers from selling double tape decks, nor did software developers stop making CD burning software that could copy audio CDs. Nor did the MP3 player market develop in the era of iTunes or a legitimate Napster.
If anyone knows of one, please leave me a comment.
Manufacturers: Please make a ogg car stereo system. Oh and make it affordable 🙂
Does it actually have to be a car stereo? You could get a handheld player that plays oggs and then connect it to your stereo by either a line-in lead or an FM retransmitter (the latter is what I do).
http://www.lowcostcaraudio.co.uk/shop/VDO-CD1737X-RDS-TunerCD-MP3WMAOGG-Player-USB-HostSDMMC-Card-Slot-Bluetooth-with-HFPHSP_searchTextJJoggZZgo.xJJ0ZZgo.yJJ0ZZsearchMethodJJproductNameZZproductJJ3472
totally agree with you. Ogg ogg ogg!
I have a jukebox that plays oggs. It is the cowon iAudio 5XL. I would like to connect it up in my car but I don’t know how. What’s this about FM retransmission please?
I bought a Cowon iAudio X5. I connected it to my car stereo with a simple mini-jack cable to the jack input on my car stereo.
Sadly I then changed cars and my new car has a non-standard sized factory fitted car stereo that you can’t swap for a standard stereo so I can’t use my stereo which has the jack input in my new car. The alternative is to buy a little FM transmitter. They basically feature a jack cable for your audio player, a short range FM transmitter, an FM tuner so you can pick an empty frequency and in some cases, a car power adapter so you can power it from the lighter socket. You can buy them from Amazon and most other online electrical goods stores.
The downside of this approach is that most people get terrible audio quality and my experience is no different. There is a hum of interference no matter what frequency I choose though it gets better if you use batteries rather than the car lighter socket adapter and some distortion on loud sections of audio, particularly hard consonants when listening to speech. This might be my audio player’s output volume being too high though and I was advised to buy one which worked from the audio device’s aux output (thus providing a standard output volume rather than one affected by the devices volume control but my player doesn’t have a jack aux output), but many other people have reported both issues with most of these devices.
However some people find that these devices work perfectly for them and having read the Amazon comments, apart from the very low end, price didn’t seem to be a factor in performance quality, so buying a more expensive one won’t necessary get you better quality, at least according to my interpretation of the comments.
If you want info on audio hardware that plays Ogg Vorbis, check out this link: http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/StaticPlayers
There are a number of manufacturers that aren’t even on this list. Good Luck in your search!
The list of manufacturers is pretty bare… it has Kenwood and JVC but both seem to have problems.
Of course you could plug any player to your stereo, but if a head unit could play ogg then you could plug in a thumb drive or hard drive which is much more convenient and would have better audio quality.
I’d like to use ogg for its gapless capabilities… right now I use an ipod for this but would much rather switch to a hard drive.
Maybe we could petition some company like they did to get ipod to play gapless…
Rio EMPEG plays FLAC and OGG if you can find one. I’ve got one, and you can’t have it 😛
Three years passed. Nothing was changed 🙁
Ok, I’m a moron. About 18 months ago, when I made the above comments about poor audio quality over an FM transmitter, I failed to realise that the FM transmitter expects a balanced signal. That’s a signal which is designed to be passed to another device without loads of noise on it, not one which is designed to be passed via your headphone to your ears.
At the time I was blindly using the headphone socket when I should have been using the line out, which provides a balanced signal. When I changed, the signal quality cleared up almost completely.
Most people who complain about really poor audio quality are probably using the headphone socket to connect to the transmitter when they should be using the line out or they’re using a player which doesn’t do any kind of balanced output signal at all. It’s your player, not the transmitter.
I’ve since bought a Cowon iAudio 7 which doesn’t have a line out, but it does do a balanced signal over the headphone socket, even though the volume goes up and down with the player volume. Don’t know how they did that, but the signal quality is fine.
Of course, you’re always going to lose audio quality sending a signal over FM rather than over a cable to an audio device. I’ve used a couple of FM transmitters and they vary a little, my most recent one is a little bassy and loses some of the top, which is a shame. And of course, they suffer from mobile phone interference.
Car stereos don’t play DRMed music no matter what the format. That can’t possibly be the reason.
The reason is low demand. Everyone uses MP3, and that’s the way it’s going to be until storage and bandwidth are so cheap and plentiful that we use lossless formats instead. Supporting every weird format in the world is not “trivial”; it requires work to implement, and there isn’t enough demand to justify the employee cost. Ogg will never catch on because there isn’t a need for it. FLAC might, though.
I disagree with you Hmm.
If you compare MP3 users to OGG users, yes. It’s a ridiculous percentage.
But if you compare the offer of the market…
There is NO car audio that can handle OGG. So I assume everyone, who wants to play OGG will buy this “one and only” car audio system. If you have no competitor, all customer goes to you. That’s worth of thinking about!
Although many many (mostly Linux) users do use OGG container for their personal audio, adding for example FLAC, to the list of supported containers, this would be my dream car stereo.
And me personally, would deffinatelly buy it.
Hi, I have bought VDO Dayton 1737K with native OGG support and I’m unexpectedly happy with it.