[theora] Misc: handycam raw to ogg / DVD to ogg

[xiphmont at xiph.org]

On Feb 13, 2008 3:59 PM, Hannes Hauswedell
<theora.list at soulrebel.in-berlin.de> wrote:

> He said he doesnt plan on adding ogg, because it is limited to theora as
> video codec (which he doesnt use himself) and has higher overhead (as
> in "space wasted for container"), even for theora.

Incorrect and Incorrect.  The mplayer team (of which the ffmpeg
project is a part) have a long-running vendetta against Ogg, part of
which is a long list of things they incorrectly claim Ogg can't do.
Their position is that the only acceptable strategy is to completely
abandon Ogg for their (practically entirely equivalent) .nut format or
they're going to take their toys and go home, which they've partially
done by refusing to implement Ogg support in any meaningful way.

> I think he would accept patches though (which I have no time to make
> right now, although I had it planned...).

The developer culture there seems more interested in complaining about patches.

> I think the main reasons for so few "Ogg-Rippers" is that
> mplayer/mencoder can't produce ogg-theora files.

...and they've proudly told me it never will.

> The
> Reference-Implementation (aka encoder_example) seems to frighten away
> lots of devs (I dont know why, but I havent used it myself yet).

Well, it's very ogg-specific.  Personally I use mplayer for alot of
conversion tasks and have hacked a mode into mine to bolt it to the
Theora example encoder.  Unfortunately, mplayer/mencoder are a bit too
buggy to just hand out the patch and recommend people use it.  Too
much functionality is subtly broken or outright nonfunctional in all
but a narrow range of uses, and those bugs would get blamed on us.

> Btw: I requested that as feature for ffmpeg some time back [1].

See above.  It's never going to happen.  The project has the
equivalent of five or six full-blown Joerg Schillings.

That said, we need to do a better job with our own tools if we can't
rely on the mplayer folks.

Monty