[theora-dev] Specification discussions, and what can a non-coder do to help?

[emaillist at dogphilosophy.net]

On Thursday 22 August 2002 06:15 am, Daniel B. Miller wrote:
>Our main thrust at Theora is to develop an
> OGG-based audio/video stream spec [...]

I figured this'd be as good a time as any to jump in...

I've been eagerly hoping for video-in-ogg since I first heard that
the .ogg specifications allowed for streams other than vorbis sound.

I was especially pleased to hear that On2 Technologies had "disencumbered"
their VP3 codec.  This, to me, means that I could conceivably generate
COMPLETELY unencumbered videos of any work that is in the public
domain.

Looking through the earlier entries in this mailing list, I see that
one enterprising soul (Mike Melanson) has also managed to get the VP3 decoder
working as a Xine plugin, though I've not yet been able to get it to work
myself (not his fault - I suspect Xine CVS is not prepared to deal with
autoconf 2.53 yet - the configure script that it generates doesn't work...) 
However, that still leaves me without an encoder.  FFMPeg/lavcodec support for
encoding and decoding was mentioned as a possibility, which I'd personally
love, as it'd make vp3 available in mplayer as well as any other project
that can make use of lavcodec from ffmpeg...

While I'm not much of a C coder, I'd very much like to help.  I can do,
for example, some testing, and participation (perhaps even useful
participation, who knows?) in discussions of the specification.

I know there's a demand for it, considering that there are already projects
underway to generate "ogg media" streams containing both audio and video, 
despite the lack of a real specification available. 
( http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/ogmtools/ )

Is this the mailing list where the discussions of the specification 
are to be taking place?  If so, can I be of some help?

(On a related note, are discussions of the specification expected to include
specs for other streams, e.g. forms of subtitles?  I'd personally love to
see a formal specification for a plain-ASCII subtitle format that includes
Closed-Caption-style capabilities [text color, screen position]...)
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