[Flac-dev] Should FLAC join Xiph?

[Josh Coalson]

I'm kind of swamped today so I'll answer what I can get
away with until tonight:

--- Joshua Haberman <joshua at haberman.com> wrote:
> The most interesting questions to me are ones you didn't address:
> 
> 1. Will Ogg FLAC become the default manifestation of the FLAC codec?
> If not, why not?  What does Ogg not offer that makes it worth having
> two different file formats of the same codec floating around?

I'm hesitant to make that decision myself, I'd rather let
users converge on something.

> 2. Will FLAC be incorporated into the Ogg project to such an extent
> that there could be one set of libraries and one set of commandline
> tools for both FLAC and Vorbis?  This would be so incredibly useful.

Without actually promising it :) I would say yes.  It sounds
like Monty et al. is/are doing work to unify multiple codecs
under a larger Ogg interface and have everything just work.
It is all coming together now that more codecs have entered
into the mix (Theora, Speex, FLAC).

> If encoding/decoding/metadata operations could be accessed from a
> single API, this would be a great boon to seeing FLAC supported in
> many more applications.  BTW, why is metadata implemented as part
> of each codec and not as part of Ogg?

That's one for Monty.  Probably the answer is "it's too hard
to come up with a spec that will satisfy even a majority
given that Ogg can contain anything".  I predict most metadata
will remain specialized, perhaps with the exception of Vorbis
comments since those are implemented in Vorbis, FLAC, and I
think also Speex.

> 3. Is there a way to convert FLAC files to Ogg FLAC?

Not without decoding.  If I had it to do over again I might
have done it differently, but in native FLAC you can not find
the frame boundaries without decoding.  This reduces the
container overhead but it's one of the drawbacks.

I am working on a transcoding interface that will be able to
at least do this without writing out to disk.

Ogg FLAC to raw FLAC however is trivial as it just involves
stripping the Ogg container off and concatenating the contents.

Josh


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