The Finch Formerly Known As Gold

25 February 2005

Yeah, format this, pal

Apple's iPod has no support for the open-source Ogg Vorbis file format, which bothers Lileks hardly at all:

Let me speak for millions here who just want to listen to music: I don't care about Ogg Vorbis. If Ogg Vorbis came to my house and waved tentacles at me demanding in a slobbery moan that I kneel and submit, I would shoot it. I don't know what it is and I don't care.

Yeah, we know: Ogg Vorbis is open-source and doesn't contain that evil Digital Rights Management bugaboo. Inasmuch as circumventing DRM is a fair-sized cottage industry already, I don't think this is much of a selling point.

Meanwhile, in the unlikely event that someone should send me a VQF file, I'm prepared.

Posted at 7:23 AM to PEBKAC


OSS products have the absolutely worst marketing ever. "Ogg Vorbis?" Could you come up with a more slimy, tentacly-sounding name? No, actually, you couldn't. There are many such stupidly-named products- in fact just about all of them have stupid names.

Posted by: Dan at 10:19 AM on 25 February 2005

At best, it's a Muppet. "Kermit! There's an Ogg Vorbis on the other side of the brook!"

Posted by: CGHill at 4:39 PM on 25 February 2005

Or a villain in a Lovecraft book:

Cthulu fought mightily with the dreaded Ogg Vorbis from morning 'til night until he vanquished it by pushing it into a live volcano.

Or speaking of volcanoes, it does sound a bit like one of Xenu's assistant - maybe the one that was in charge of stacking the people against the volcanoes.

Posted by: Dan at 5:21 PM on 25 February 2005