OGG Player

OGG Player is a free tool for listening to your Ogg Vorbis audio files and watch your Ogg videos on your computer.

The simplicity of its interface and its intuitive controls are probably this tool’s main assets. Although the quality of its video playback capabilities – subject to the quality of the Ogg video itself - is also worth noting.

When it comes to audio, the player offers just a set of basic controls – mainly those needed to play and stop the files. No information is given about the track being played, except for its length and the time elapsed. Video playback, however, comes with some extra functionality. Thus, OGG Player allows you to select the subtitle stream you want to use (when available), save screenshots of your favorite frames, change the ratio, or view the file on a frame-by-frame basis.

Despite being a free, patent-free, open-source technology, not all software video players include the necessary codecs to play Ogg files, maybe due to the fact that, when it comes to video, Ogg has not gained the same popularity as AVI, MPEG, or FLV. Thus, it is always useful to have an Ogg player installed in your system, just in case. Just a small caveat, though – although OGG is the default extension for all Ogg files (both audio and video) you may come across OGV files for video content and OGA files containing Ogg audio. OGG Player will play back both seamlessly, but it will not recognize these files as Ogg content automatically. This means that you will need to change the extension of these files manually into OGG before loading them into the player.