The OggSQUISH Strategy
Last Updated: May 8, 1996
OggSQUISH is meant to provide a durable, highly extensible audio
compression framework that will set the pace in audio compression,
storage, manipulation and transmission technology for the next decade.
OggSquish is designed to be a viable audio technology for the next
10-20 years. The OggSQUISH Overview
discusses more aspects of the engine's advantages over more
conservative approaches.
The OggSQUISH Application Library (libogg)
The main OggSquish engine is to be available in a fully encapsulated library form with an API as
of OggSQUISH release 0.98. This allows the
compression engine to be consistently and easily used with audio
applications on any platform.
OggSQUISH Uses and Applications
OggSQUISH is targetted at a wide variety of fixed and
variable-bandwidth compression uses such as archiving, realtime audio
stream transmission and embedded application file formats. Various
developers have displayed interest in everything from serving
OggSQUISH bitstreams from the Web and multicasting Internet 'radio
stations' with OggSQUISH to adding realtime voice messaging capability
to the Internet starship battle game 'Netrek'.
Because the core compression is an encapsulated
library, any application that uses large amounts of audio can make
use of OggSquish.
The OggStream Realtime Internet Audio Server
The OggStream internet audio server (scheduled to appear by end of
4thQ 1996) will offer realtime audio over the internet and modem
links. OggStream intends to use multicast; broadcast to millions of
listeners at once without affecting your server performance over the
first user! Even more importantly, OggStream is based on the Libogg library which can run on every
platform: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, OS/2, BSD, Silicon Graphics,
BeBox, and so on...
Best of all, the OggStream server and player are to be released under
the same terms as other Xiphophorus OggSQUISH
software; you'll be able to download your very own radio (or radio
station) for free!
OggSQUISH in Hardware?
Fully implementing OggSQUISH in hardware would seriously restrict it's
flexibility, as well as being a daunting task. A better solution is
to implement the transforms that OggSQUISH uses, leaving the
interpretation and compression management layer in software.
In fact, several of the newest game cards for PCs provide some of
those functions... could we be seeing an OggBlaster in the near
future? :-)
The High Speed "OggLite" Codecs
OggSQUISH is a large scale, industial strength program that is meant
to do everything; however, this also makes it larger than a small,
specialized CODEC.
Many Ogg users and applications would likely need only a single
compression algorithm or closely related set of algorithms. For this
reason, we plan to expnad the OggSQUISH family with a series of
'OggLite' CODECs. These codecs will come in a number of flavors
designed to implement only one (or a small set) of compression
scripts, and run them as quickly as possible.
OggLite is intended to be compatable with the full OggSQUISH
implementation; OggLite bitstreams will be fully compliant with the
OggSQUISH bitstream specification. In addition, full OggSQUISH
encoder applications have the option of generating bitstreams that are
decodable by OggLite. "It's all in the scripts."
Fully integrated audio, still images, video, and documents in
OggSQUISH 2.0
OggSQUISH is not intended to stop with audio; technologically
speaking, video is easier to compress than audio, and demand for
combined audio/video applications is increasing rapidly. OggSQUISH
intends to be a true 'complete media' compression by version 2.0.
OggSQUISH, OggScript, OggLite, the Thor-and-the-Snake logo and
Xiphophorus are trademarks (tm) of the Xiphophorus company. The
OggSQUISH library and OggSQUISH applications by Xiphophorus are
copyright (C) 1994-1996 Xiphophorus. All rights reserved.
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Address comments to: xiphmont@cs.titech.ac.jp