OGG is a free, professional-grade, and open standard media format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. It is not restricted by patents and is designed to offer efficient streaming and manipulation to digital multimedia. Besides, it is supported by many audio players and portable music players.

OGG is an open and standardized bit stream container format, which is designed for streaming and manipulation. OGG files can multiplex a serious of separate free and open source codecs of audio, video, metadata and text, such as subtitles. This compressed audio file is like an .mp3 file. Although in the same size, OGG sounds much better than an MP3 file. What the OGG Vorbis does is more or less the same as the MP3 audio format does, but OGG can not be burdened with certain patents.

An OGG file is a written format. Everybody can create and use OGG files as he likes. The main tasks of OGG applications are to compress music for users to either send it over the Internet or save it in computers. For it is free, the various codecs of OGG have been incorporated into a number of different free codecs. The OGG codecs have been used by many commercial media players, as well as portable media players and GPS receivers.

There are many programs that can open OGG files:
Windows operating system: Zinf, BS.Player, foobar2000, VideoLAN VLC Media Player,Roxio Creator 2010, Nullsoft Winamp Media Player, CoreCodec CorePlayer Pro, The Core Media Player with DirectShow filter, RadLight Media Player with DirectShow filter, Microsoft Windows Media Player with DirectShow filter, RealNetworks RealPlayer with Xiph OGG plugin, Apple QuickTime Player with the XiphQT plugin
Pocket PC: GreenSoftware GSPlayer, CoreCodec CorePlayer Mobile
Linux operating system: Zinf, Totem, RealNetworks RealPlayer, Amarok, VideoLAN VLC Media Player, CoreCodec CorePlayer Pro
Mac operating system: Roxio Toast 10 Titanium, No-U-Turn OGG Drop, CoreCodec CorePlayer Pro, VideoLAN VLC Media Player, Whamb Digital Audio Player, Apple QuickTime Player with the XiphQT plugin, RealNetworks RealPlayer with Xiph OGG plugin