[theora-dev] It's quiet. TOO quiet.

[Dan Miller]

> From: emaillist+ot at dogphilosophy.net
 
> While I'm writing here - I DO have a question for you, then, 
> as the one
> working on the Theora bitstream specification.  Will the Theora codec 
> be directly usable in other container formats?  Or, the question I am
> more specifically getting at, how difficult would it likely 
> be if, say, 
> the FFMpeg or MPlayer/Mencoder projects wanted to go ahead and add 
> Theora encoding support into the existing container format(s) 
> that they
> use?  (Mencoder currently only produces .avi, as far as I 
> know.)  From what
> I can tell (which, admittedly, isn't all that much) there's 
> not much of
> anything that really needs to be done to the codec (other 
> than, e.g. basic
> optimization) at all, and all of the difficulty involved is 
> simply getting
> the specification and implementation off Theora in the Ogg file format
> worked out, is this true?

that's basically the case (all of the work presently is focused on the integration of Theora (nee VP3) within the Ogg framework.

At this point, if someone wanted to develop encoders or decoders that do NOT depend on Ogg as a container would probably be best served by working with the old VP3 codebase (available at www.theora.org/cvs).

As for your comments on marketing & communications, I second Moritz's comments in this forum.  I do think there is some trepidation wrt getting too much focus before we're technically ready.  It's also true that xiph.org is not an over-funded foundation and needs to be very careful to husband its limited resources.  However it is easy to get the attention of Emmett at least (Monty to a lesser degree) by visiting irc.xiph.org.  For now, the #vorbis chatroom is pretty much the default meetingplace, with #theora not getting much use.  I expect that will change after the beta release.  I try to check in there every couple days, and I do monitor this board pretty much daily.  (note that while there is plenty of OT chatter on IRC, if you have a real technical, usage, or business question, usually the relevant person's attention can be gained with a little patience.  It's also pretty much accepted to /msg someone without permission -- at least I don't mind; it's not a singles hangout).

Keep the faith, help is on the way -dbm
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