[theora] libtheora 1.0 alpha8 released, beta1 imminent

[Maik Merten]

Hello,

it's a great pleasure for me to announce the availability of libtheora
alpha8 and the imminent availability of beta1.

http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/theora/libtheora-1.0alpha8.tar.gz

alpha8 brings a completely new decoder (feature complete, lifted from
derf's theora-exp) and additional control over the encoder (applications
now can specify their own set of quantization parameters etc.) amongst
other things.

alpha8 concludes the series of alpha releases and basically wraps up the
development since alpha7 in one nice and tidy package. It's expected to
be the most short-lived Theora release ever.

On top of that beta1 will bring a minor modification to the bitstream
format (the discussion for this reaches back to
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora-dev/2005-June/002798.html ) to be
more coherent with the other Ogg codecs. Old content will still play
back in new decoders and new encodings won't trigger old decoders to
explode either. The code for beta1 is basically current SVN trunk.

Please test. The plan is to push beta1 out of the door on friday given
no serious problems are found.

As a side note: The Visual Studio project files are completely outdated.
A new set of project files would be a very welcome contribution.


Maik Merten