[Theora] Playing Ogg Theora movies on MacOS X -- information pointer request

[Jack Moffitt]

> >If anyone is being neglected, it's the OS X users who still don't have
> >any good solutions, and to those users, I offer our apologies.  We just
> >can't seem to get the help we need from Apple on this.
> 
> Is there a wiki page or Theora mailing list thread discussing what 
> information is needed?
> 
> I don't work for Apple, but I'm curious.

I'm not aware of such a page.  Concrete information would be useful, but
you'd have to ask everyone involved for their bits of it.  Here's the
issues as I understand them:

* iTunes does not have a public encoding API, so there is no way to
  support ogg encoding within iTunes.

* iTunes does not have a public decoding API, but can play arbitrary
  quicktime content.  This only works for local playback, not network
  playback.

* iPod cannot play oggs.

* Quicktime doesn't seem to deal well with VBR codecs, though each rev
  seems to get better.  There are currently some quicktime components
  that work on windows and os x, but these have limitations on what
  bitrates they support and I believe tags are wonky.  It is my
  understanding that this is due to inherent limitations in the
  Quicktime API. Streaming may or may not work, I don't remember.  I seem 
  to recall it "sort of" working.

* Quicktime can grab codecs from a centralized update server.  Our
  components should be there.

* iPods can't play Ogg.

At the very least we'd like Ogg support in iTunes for decoding and
streaming.  Encoding and support in quicktime is probably next on the
list, with support in the ipod and quicktime auto-fetch being pretty
wishlisty.

Please feel free to put this in the wiki and start a page for it.

jack.