[Jim_MDP]

My first look at one� impressive. Xvid/DivX and Vorbis audio.

Very, VERY clean for a 700mb file. No black to green in dark scenes and no motion artifacts seen in a quick look see scan of the movie.

Plays fine in both VLC and MPlayer except no timecode so no scrub control in MPlayer.

What's the history/future of this format? And, is this an average impression or just luck?

[Uncle Skeleton]

the open source community got tired of waiting for the ogg/theora project to start supporting video, so they hacked ogg and called it ogm. Around now, the actual theora project is starting to finish (or finishing to start), so there will probably be a fork between ogm and whatever theora will finally be called. The future of both formats is dismal compared to mp4, mov, or even other patent-free open-source newcomers like matroska (in my opinion).

In general you will see better rips in ogm format, not because of any superiority of the format, but because it is "1337" and the people who take the trouble to use it generally know what they're doing and take pride in their work. But it's a real pain to edit these files on a Mac.