title: Why is FLAC Streaming over HTTP done with Ogg encapsulation instead of natively?
body: <p>All of the current FLAC streaming implementations (such as Edcast with Icecast) seem to use Ogg as a container for FLAC while streaming.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What is the  reason for this?</li>
  <li>What are the drawbacks of <em>not</em> using Ogg, and streaming the "native" FLAC stream instead?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I've done some tests streaming FLAC over HTTP, and it seems to work just fine in VLC.  FLAC seems to be <a href="http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html" rel="noreferrer">built in such a way that frames can stand independently</a>, making it robust against stream corruption and/or dropped frames.  Given this, I don't quite understand why wrapping FLAC in Ogg is necessary.</p>