Ogg Codecs

Ogg Codecs is a set of encoders and deocoders for Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Theora and FLAC. Once installed you will be able to play Vorbis, Speex, Theora and FLAC files in Windows Media Player or any other Windows Directshow media player

Ogg Vorbis is an audio compression format.

It is roughly comparable to other formats used to store and play digital music, such as MP3, VQF, AAC, and other digital audio formats. It is different from these other formats because it is completely free, open, and unpatented.

Speex is an Open Source/Free Software patent-free audio compression format designed for speech. The Speex Project aims to lower the barrier of entry for voice applications by providing a free alternative to expensive proprietary speech codecs. Moreover, Speex is well-adapted to Internet applications and provides useful features that are not present in most other codecs.

Theora is a free and open video compression format from the Xiph.org Foundation. Theora scales from postage stamp to HD resolution, and is considered particularly competitive at low bitrates. It is in the same class as MPEG-4/DiVX, and like the Vorbis audio codec it has lots of room for improvement as encoder technology develops.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.