[theora-dev] Release: liboggz 0.9.6

[Conrad Parker]

Oggz 0.9.6 Release
------------------

Oggz comprises liboggz and the command-line tools oggzinfo, oggzdump,
oggzdiff, oggzmerge, oggzrip, oggz-comment, oggz-scan and oggz-validate.

liboggz is a C library providing a simple programming interface for reading
and writing Ogg files and streams. Ogg is an interleaving data container
developed by Monty at Xiph.Org, originally to support the Ogg Vorbis audio
format.

This release is available as a source tarball at:

http://www.annodex.net/software/liboggz/download/liboggz-0.9.6.tar.gz

New in this release:
--------------------

This release adds a new oggz-comment tool, and improvements to liboggz's
determination of timestamps and seeking. Specifically, liboggz now inspects
the encoded data in order reconstruct the expected granulepos (corresponding
to a timestamp) for every packet in an Ogg stream. This allows applications
to use reliable timestamps, even though these are only sparsely recorded in
most Ogg streams.

Details:
--------

Tools:
	* Added new oggz-comment tool (Kangyuan Niu)
	* Added Skeleton support to oggzinfo (Tahseen Mohammad)
	* Report FLAC samplerate, channels in oggzinfo (Conrad Parker)

Documentation:

	* Improved oggzmerge documentation (Debian bug #280550)

liboggz API:

	* Added content type detection and retrieval functions
	  oggz_stream_get_content(), oggz_stream_get_content_type()
	  (Shane Stephens)
	* Added oggz_tell_granulepos function to query liboggz for
	  granulepos values. (Shane Stephens)
	* Added Vorbiscomment API oggz_comment_*() for manipulating comments
	  in Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Theora, FLAC files (Conrad Parker, Ian Malone)
	* Added oggz_get_numtracks() (Conrad Parker)

Internal:

	* Added automatic calculation of missing granulepos values
	  in Vorbis, Speex, Theora (Shane Stephens) and FLAC (Conrad Parker)
	* Seeking improvements (Shane Stephens)
	* Corrections for C standards support (Erik de Castro Lopo)
	* GNU Autotools build system updates (Ralph Giles, Thomas van der
	  Stichele)
	* Updated Win32 build system (Alex Krumm-Heller, Marcin Lubonski)
	* libtool shared version info updated to 4:0:3

About Oggz
----------

Oggz comprises liboggz and the command-line tools oggzinfo, oggzdump,
oggzdiff, oggzmerge, oggzrip, oggz-comment, oggz-scan and oggz-validate.

liboggz supports the flexibility afforded by the Ogg file format while
presenting the following API niceties:

        * Full API documentation

        * Comprehensive test suite of read, write and seeking behavior.
        The entire test suite can be run under valgrind if available.

        * Developed and tested on GNU/Linux, Darwin/MacOSX, Win32 and
        Symbian OS. May work on other Unix-like systems via GNU autoconf.
        For Win32: nmake Makefiles, Visual Studio .NET 2003 solution files
        and Visual C++ 6.0 workspace files are provided in the source
        distribution.

        * Strict adherence to the formatting requirements of Ogg bitstreams,
        to ensure that only valid bitstreams are generated; writes can fail
        if you try to write illegally structured packets.

        * A simple, callback based open/read/close or open/write/close
        interface to raw Ogg files.

        * Writing automatically interleaves with packet queuing, and provides	
        callback based notification when this queue is empty

        * A customisable seeking abstraction for seeking on multitrack Ogg
        data. Seeking works easily and reliably on multitrack and multi-codec
        streams, and can transparently parse Theora, Speex, Vorbis, FLAC,
        CMML and Ogg Skeleton headers  without requiring linking to those
        libraries. This allows efficient use on servers and other devices
        that need to parse and seek within Ogg files, but do not need to do
        a full media decode.

Full documentation of the liboggz API, customization and installation,
and mux and demux examples can be read online at:

    http://www.annodex.net/software/liboggz/html/

Tools
-----

The Oggz source tarball also contains the following command-line tools,
which are useful for debugging and testing Ogg bitstreams:

        * oggzinfo: Display information about one or more Ogg files and
        their bitstreams.

        * oggzdump: Hexdump packets of an Ogg file, or revert an Ogg file
        from such a hexdump.

        * oggzdiff: Hexdump the packets of two Ogg files and output
        differences.

        * oggzmerge: Merge Ogg files together, interleaving pages in order
        of presentation time.

        * oggzrip: Extract one or more logical bitstreams from an Ogg file.

	* oggz-comment: List or edit comments in an Ogg file.

        * oggz-scan: Scan an Ogg file and output characteristic landmarks.

        * oggz-validate: Validate the Ogg framing of one or more files.

License
-------

Oggz is Free Software, available under a BSD style license.

More information is available online at the Oggz homepage:

    http://www.annodex.net/software/liboggz/

enjoy :)

--
Conrad Parker, Annodex Association
http://www.annodex.net/