[ogg-dev] Header packet multiplicity

[Conrad Parker]

On 14/02/2008, Ralph Giles <giles at xiph.org> wrote:
> On 13-Feb-08, at 3:40 AM, ogg.k.ogg.k at googlemail.com wrote:
>
> > However, I was concerned about the RTP streaming case, where packets
> > may be lost, and the "other" container case, where they have to be
> > concatenated (and thus one needs a way to walk past them easily).
> > I reckon I'll just add a "header length" to headers past the first
> > one, and
> > maybe on data packets as well. I'm not clear at all on what would
> > happen
> > when not in Ogg, I need to think more about this case.
>
> There are a usually lot more data packets than header packets, so
> having an internal length there hurts your bitrate a lot more. Of
> course, it may not be significant for an uncompressed text codec.

there's also the possibility of having a marker in the first byte to
say whether its a header packet or not, kinda like how vorbis and
theora start their header packets with (0x1, 0x3, 0x5,) and (0x80,
0x81, 0x82) respectively ... and then make sure not to start data
packets that way. That does make it a little dirty for a text codec
though as you always have to check/skip the first byte of your data
packets.

Conrad.