What is Ogg Vorbis?

First off, that's a very interesting typo in your question because the audio codec you're asking about is called Vorbis and the container that's used to transmit the Vorbis format audio is called Ogg. Somehow you turned that into a Slavic D&D fan's name or something! :-)

The details of Ogg Vorbis are quickly gleaned from Wikipedia fortunately:

"Vorbis is an open and free lossy audio compression (codec) project from the Xiph.org Foundation. It is frequently used in conjunction with the Ogg container and is then called Ogg Vorbis. It is important to note that although the Vorbis format is often simply referred to as Ogg, this is technically incorrect as Ogg is a container format while Vorbis is an audio codec.

"Vorbis began following a September 1998 letter from Fraunhofer Gesellschaft announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 format. Soon after, founder Christopher "Monty" Montgomery commenced work on the project and was assisted by a growing collection of other developers. They continued refining the code until a stable version 1.0 of the codec was released on July 19, 2002.

"The latest official version is 1.1.2 released on 2005-11-28, but there are some fine-tuned forks available, like aoTuV beta 4.51. Source code (called libvorbis) for the Xiph release is available from the official Vorbis.com web site, while many Windows binaries can be downloaded at Rarewares.org. Source code and binaries for the aoTuV release are available at the author's own site."

The official site for Ogg Vorbis is Vorbis.com, logically enough, where it lists tons of software that supports the Vorbis codec and further details:

"Ogg Vorbis is a new 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.

"Does Ogg Vorbis sound better than MP3?

"Yes, definitely. Naturally, we invite you to judge this for yourself; please see our Dare to Compare page for at least some of our listening samples."

Oh, one more thing. the name "Ogg" turns out to be some jargon that arose in the computer game Netrek, originally meaning a kamikaze attack, and later, more generally, to do something forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. At its inception, the Ogg project was thought to be somewhat ambitious given the power of the PC hardware of the time.

Hope that helps clear things up!