The Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to producing public domain multimedia formats and tools. Their primary focus is on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Ogg Vorbis, an open and patent-free audio format and codec designed to compete with the patented MP3 and AAC. Current development work is focusing on Ogg Theora, an open and patent-free video format and codec designed to compete with the patented MPEG-4, RealVideo, and Windows Media Video. A non-profit organization (often called non-profit org or simply non-profit or not-for-profit) is an organization whose primary objective is something other than the generation of profit. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... Multimedia is the use of several different media to convey information (text, audio, graphics, animation, video, and interactivity). ... Ogg is a patent-free, fully open multimedia bitstream container designed for efficient streaming and storage. ... Vorbis is an open and free audio compression (codec) project from the Xiph. ... A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a government to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of an invention. ... MP3 is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format. ... Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a lossy data compression scheme intended for audio streams. ... Theora is a video codec being developed by the Xiph. ... MPEG-4, introduced in late 1998, is the designation for a group of audio and video coding standards and related technology agreed upon by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). ... RealVideo is a proprietary video codec developed by RealNetworks. ... Windows Media Video (WMV) is a generic name for the set of streaming video technologies developed by Microsoft. ...

In addition to its in-house development work, the Foundation has also brought several already-existing but complementary free software projects under its aegis, most of which have a separate, active group of developers. Among these are Speex, an audio codec designed for speech, and FLAC, a lossless audio codec. Free software, as defined by Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation, can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed. ... The Speex project is an attempt to create a free software speech codec, unencumbered by patent restrictions. ... The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) Logo. ...

Xiph.Org projects

• Ogg
  • Vorbis
  • Theora
  • Tarkin
  • Speex
  • Writ
  • Tremor
  • OggMNG
• FLAC (can be inside an Ogg container, though it usually is not)
• cdparanoia
• Icecast
• IceShare

Ogg is a patent-free, fully open multimedia bitstream container designed for efficient streaming and storage. ... Vorbis is an open and free audio compression (codec) project from the Xiph. ... Theora is a video codec being developed by the Xiph. ... Tarkin is an experimental lossy video codec formerly under development by the Xiph. ... The Speex project is an attempt to create a free software speech codec, unencumbered by patent restrictions. ... Ogg Writ is a text-phrase codec used with the Ogg encapsulation format. ... Tremor is a fixed-point version of the Ogg Vorbis decoder for those platforms that cant do floating point math. ... The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) Logo. ... cdparanoia is a compact disc ripper for Linux and BeOS. It was designed to be a minimalistic, high-quality CD ripper that would be able to compensate for and adjust to poor hardware to produce a flawless rip. ... Icecast is an open source streaming media project maintained by the creators of the Ogg media format, Xiph. ... IceShare is a vaporware peercasting system for Ogg multimedia. ...

External links

• Official site (http://www.xiph.org/)
• Wiki site (http://wiki.xiph.org/)