Development of the OGG container format began in 1993 and the first stable version was released in 2002. In 2003, standardization and definition was finally achieved by RFCs (RFC 3533 and RFC 3534, later replaced by RFC 5334 in 2008).

The OGG format appears as free software under the BSD License 2.0. A wide variety of audio and video codecs can be included in the OGG container format.

OGG contains a number of independent open source codecs for audio and video. Due to the fact that this format is patent free and completely open, the different codecs of OGG were integrated into different free and commercial media players.