Vorbis
royalty-free lossy audio encoding format
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis.
Version 1.0 of Vorbis was released in May 2000. Since 2013, the Xiph.Org Foundation has stated that the use of Vorbis should be deprecated in favor of the Opus codec, an improved and more efficient format that has also been developed by Xiph.Org.
Name
Vorbis is named after the character Exquisitor Vorbis in the Discworld novel Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. The Ogg format is named after ogging, jargon from the computer game Netrek.
Development
Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery. Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format. The Vorbis project started as part of the Xiphophorus company's Ogg project (also known as OggSquish multimedia project).
The public source identifies “Vorbis” as royalty-free lossy audio encoding format. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Vorbis, royalty-free and lossy.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11885120. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2013, 1993 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vorbis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.