MP3 vs Ogg Vorbis
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[edit] Features
[edit] Lossy
Both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis are lossy formats.
[edit] Variable Bit Rate
Both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis support variable bit rate encoding.
[edit] Channel Support
Ogg supports more than 2 channels - up to 256. Mp3 supports 2 discrete channels, as well as "Joint Stereo" which, briefly stated, seeks to use commonalities of the two stereo channels to reduce the amount of data needed to store the audio stream.
[edit] License
Ogg Vorbis is a free and open audio encoding format.
MP3 is a proprietary media encoding format. The designers of the MP3 format claim that they can charge royalties for any software or file that uses their format.In the US, the last patent will expire in 2017.
[edit] Sound Quality
Many claim that the 128bps encoding for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis are similar in quality while Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3 at 192kbps. Ogg Vorbis is much better than MP3 at very low bitrates (64kbps, etc). See links to public listening tests.
[edit] Popularity
MP3, because of its early entry into the file sharing world, became and is immensely popular. Its popularity is marked by the fact that the term MP3 was synonymous with Compressed audio. Some people use the term MP3 to mean any audio file.
Ogg Vorbis is steadily gaining ground among developers because of its superior sound quality and open source code base. Notably, toys and hardware manufacturers are using Ogg Vorbis to encode their audio files to achieve efficient compression and avoid patent issues with MP3. However, the vast majority of portable music players (commonly referred to as "MP3 players" by many people) still do not support the Ogg Vorbis format. Ogg Vorbis is very popular in the game development industry and is featured prominently in Doom3 and the idTech4 engine.
Portable players advertised with Ogg support are rare. It's common to find out that a player does support Ogg Vorbis even though this feature wasn't mentioned.
