Ogg usage is on the rise says FSF,  and this is good news for end-users everywhere, but the really good news is that we can expect things to get even better. With Mozilla’s recent announcement of adding native Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis support to their browsers, many more sites will begin streaming Ogg.

What exactly is Ogg ?

Ogg is a professional grade media format. It consists of two parts.

1. Ogg Vorbis which encodes audio and
2. Ogg Theora which encodes video.

All Ogg files will have the .ogg extension. Almost all Free multimedia players bundled with Linux distributions are capable of playing Ogg media files.

Unlike its more popular counterpart MP3, Ogg Vorbis is not restricted by patents. This makes it the darling of all Free software enthusiasts the world over.  And FSF has been actively promoting this media format through the site PlayOgg.org.

And if you do not have an Ogg friendly media player, then never fear because you can play the media via the Cortado Java applet which has also been released under GPL. By embedding this applet in their website, webmasters can give viewers access to streams from either the Flumotion streaming server or play a local file from their server without relying on a media player supporting the correct formats on the clients’ computer.

Source : FSF Blog