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OGG
What is an OGG file?
The royalty-free audio format. Common in games and on Linux, rare on phones.
What OGG is
OGG is a container: a wrapper that holds streams encoded by something else. It is used for the web and handing a finished file over.
The extension is .ogg, and the full name is Ogg Vorbis. Both matter less than what the file can hold, which is what the rest of this page is about.
Where OGG came from
Xiph.Org published it in 2000. The specification is RFC 3533.
Age is worth knowing here for one practical reason: the older a format is, the more programs have had time to learn it.
The specification is public
Anyone can implement it without asking permission or paying a licence, which is why it turns up in so many programs and why files written twenty years ago still open.
OGG is a box, and the codec is what is in it
It usually holds Vorbis, Opus and FLAC. This is the distinction behind most "why will this not play" questions: two files with the same extension can contain entirely different encodings, and a player that refuses one may be perfectly happy with the other.
It also explains why changing container is often fast and lossless while changing codec is neither. Moving the same stream into a different box rewrites the box; re-encoding rewrites the picture.
What else it can carry
OGG can hold a layout that lets it start playing before it has finished arriving.
That matters mostly when converting: whatever the target cannot hold is dropped, usually without a warning.
What opens OGG
Audacity, VLC and foobar2000 read it, and so do most programs of the same kind.
If a file will not open, the format is rarely the problem — it is more often that the program predates it. Converting to something older is the reliable way past that, and it is what the rest of this site is for.
Opening it in a browser
Current browsers read it; older ones do not.
Where support is uneven, serving a second format alongside it is the usual answer — the browser takes the one it understands and nobody is left out.
What it can carry besides the content
OGG can hold document properties.
Whether any of it survives a conversion depends entirely on the target, and the honest answer is usually "some of it".
It is a delivery format
OGG is meant to be handed over rather than worked in. Editing one is possible and rarely pleasant; the sane approach is to change the source and export again.
What goes wrong with it
The recurring complaints: support outside its home ground is uneven.
None of these is a reason to avoid the format. They are the things worth knowing before you are surprised by one, which is a different claim and a more useful one.
The facts, in one place
| Extension | .ogg, .oga |
|---|---|
| Media type | audio/ogg |
| Published by | Xiph.Org |
| First published | 2000 |
| Specification | RFC 3533 |