Free multimedia codecs, containers, and splitters

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 31. Chapters: Vorbis, Ogg, Free Lossless Audio Codec, Speex, LAME, Theora, Dirac, Xvid, WebM, FFmpeg, VP8, Matroska, WavPack, Libavcodec, X264, Musepack, Ffdshow, TTA, Ogg Squish, Mp3splt, List of open source codecs, CELT, TooLAME, Demultiplexer, Audio Video Standard, FFV1, Libsndfile, OMS Video, OpenAVS, AC3Filter, MPEG Audio Decoder. Excerpt: Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation (formerly Xiphophorus company). The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation (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. Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery. Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format. Vorbis project started as part of the Xiphophorus company's Ogg project (also known as OggSquish multimedia project). Chris Montgomery began work on the project and was assisted by a growing number of other developers. They continued refining the source code until the Vorbis file format was frozen for 1.0 in May 2000 and a stable version (1.0) of the reference software was released on July 19, 2002. The Xiph.Org Foundation maintains a reference implementation, libvorbis, the latest official version of which is 1.3.2, released on November 1, 2010. There are also some fine-tuned forks, most notably aoTuV, that offer better audio quality, particularly at low bitrates. These improvements are periodically merged back into the reference codebase. "Vorbis" is named after a Discworld character, Exquisitor Vorbis in Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. The Ogg format, however, is not named for Nanny Ogg, another Discworld character; the name is in fact derived from ogging, jargon that arose in the computer game Netrek. The Vorbis format has proven popular among supporters of free software. They argue that its higher fidelity and completely free nature, unencumbered by patents, make it a well-suited replacement for patented and restricted formats like MP3. Vorbis ExampleVorbis has different uses for consumer products. Many video game titles such as 18 Wheels of Steel, Halo, Unreal To