Ogg Page - Purpose

Purpose

One of the purposes of multimedia container formats is to allow multiple codecs to be muxed into a single file or stream. For example, to combine audio, video, and subtitles into a single file.

The viewpoint held by Christopher Montgomery, creator of the Ogg format, is that the units of muxed codec data should be a separate abstraction layer from the units of data used by the codec in order to limit the amount of buffering necessary when decoding the contained data. In his opinion, which is supported by other developers working with the Xiph.org Foundation, this gives Ogg a technical advantage over alternative bitstream formats such as AVI, QuickTime, and MPEG.

Each Ogg page also provides the time offset of the contained data which allows efficient seeking which works with streaming and time accurate. In contrast, many other formats seek to byte positions in the stream or rely on a table of contents for seeking information.