[ogg-dev] "Any who has ever written an Ogg (de)muxer curses it's name frequently" (sic)

[Ralph Giles]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 07:02:40PM +0000, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves wrote:

> "Second, whether AVI is better or worse than Ogg is debatable. Any who
> has ever written an Ogg (de)muxer curses it's name frequently. It's
> extremely codec-specific, and the format is rather loosely defined,
> with no consistent standard way to do much of anything....
> 
> AVI has it's limitations, but they are few. Most of the problems
> people experience with AVI is due entirely to limited software which
> doesn't properly handle AVIs. The rest of the problems tend to be a
> result of lack of standards... For instance, Vorbis can fit into AVI
> just fine, but unfortunately, Xiph didn't define HOW exactly, so
> everyone has started doing it in their own, mutually incompatible way.
> Ditto for subtitles, and other meta-data.

So it's hard to write an ogg muxer, and the problem with AVI is that 
there's no good software support? Maybe it's just hard to write a muxer?

> "For instance, Vorbis can fit into AVI just fine, but unfortunately,
> Xiph didn't define HOW exactly, so everyone has started doing it in
> their own, mutually incompatible way."

If there's a reasonable way to do this, sure. I assume it can't be too 
bad, since there are lots of xvid+mp3 videos in avi on the net. But no 
one's ever explained how one does this, so I don't actually have an 
opinion. I just know some xiph people have said the proposals aren't 
good technically, and some other people have done it anyway.

> Out of curiosity, how hard is to write a tiny API explaining what is
> the official method of having Vorbis contained in other formats?

specification you mean? Yes, those can go as appendicies to the vorbis 
spec, along with the ogg and rtp embeddings.

> According to Wikipedia, Tobias Waldvogel has donated all Ogg Media
> code to Xiph.  Why then is Ogg still unable to cope with any other
> format outside of Xiph?  Are there technical problems?  Will we have
> this working one day?

Are you talking about tobias' directshow filters? They've not been 
maintained in years, and we've been recommending illi's instead because
they were and seem to work better.

 -r

> Food for thought, really, but this kind of little buggers are stalling
> interest in Xiph's work.  I think we must find solutions and get a
> roadmap going, or something in that regard.

We've got roadmaps a plenty. What we need is people doing things. :)

 -r