[vorbis-dev] Future of vorbis-tools (was Re: Manpages)

[Michael Smith]

>Actually, I hate groff.  It's a nasty markup language.  :)  [Does anyone know
>of a better tool for making man pages?  Please tell me!]  But, yes, I
wouldn't
>mind doing a manpage.  Can you send me some example command lines with short
>(3 sentence max) descriptions of what they do?  OggEnc is fairly complex;
some
>examples in the manpage about how to use it (especially the pattern-based
>naming) would be helpful to users.

Thanks very much. Ok, here are some useful command lines:

# simplest version. Produces output as somefile.ogg
oggenc somefile.wav 

# specifying an output filename
oggenc somefile.wav -o out.ogg 

# Adding some info about the track
oggenc somefile.wav -t "The track title" -a "artist who performed this" -l
"name of album" -c "OTHERFIELD=contents of some other field not explictly
supported"

# Multiple files, auto-naming output files (example taken from something I
encoded the other day)

oggenc -a "The Tea Party" -l "Triptych" -t "Touch" track01.wav -t
"Underground" track02.wav -t "Great Big Lie" track03.wav [...] -n "%a -
%t.ogg"

# more explanation of the above: encodes the three files, each with the
same artist/album tag, but with different title tags on each one. The
string given as an argument to -n is used to generate filenames - %a ->
artist, %t - title, %l -> album, %% -> literal %. So this gives filenames
like "The Tea Party - Touch.ogg" (which is how I like to name my files)

# Encoding from stdin, to stdout (you can also use the various tagging
options, like -t, -a, -l, etc.)
oggenc -

That's all I can think of right now (mail me offlist if you have specific
questions about anything here) - once b2 gets merged to mainline, I'll add
options for different encoding modes, but doing so now will just break
things. That's the only major feature addition coming soon (other things
I'm going to do are targeted at portability)

>You also reminded me of some questions I was about to ask:
>
>* What is the goal of the vorbis-tools tree?  Is it to provide basic command
>line utilities to UNIX-like systems?

Not sure - but that's what it is right now, more or less (except it doesn't
generally build cleanly on any non-GNU system, as far as I can tell). For
my part, I intend to make oggenc build/run on win32 as well (I have a
hacked up version that I've distributed binaries of to a few people). I
think it's a worthwhile aim to have vorbis-tools to evolve into a
full-featured set of (portable) command-line vorbis programs.

>
>* What tools/capabilities do we need for the eventual 1.0 release?

Encoders: primarily, we need support for other modes. This is pretty
trivial once the mode descriptions exist.
Decoders/players: mostly just need buffering and streaming capabilities.
Other tools: vorbis-comment needs some work (useful error messages for one
- blame that one on me), and needs an end-user wrapper (shell script or perl?)

>
>* Is vorbize really going to be deprecated in favor of OggEnc?

I don't see any reason to get rid of vorbize - it's probably simpler to use
(though I've not actually used it myself. Just read all the code ;)
OggEnc is, apparently, going to become the 'official' encoder for now
(until something better comes along?). Right now, both oggenc and vorbize
are in the vorbis-tools build.

>
>* Are the vorbis-tools eventually going to be spun off into their own
package?
>If so, when will we see a shared library version of vorbisfile and libvorbis
>distributed?

I think Monty intends to completely reorganise the stuff in CVS - probably
ending up with libvorbis in one module, and everything else in other modules. 

Shared libraries could be built at any point - but doing so too early is
mostly a pain, because you lose binary compatibility, so it's useless.
Possibly after beta2 would be a reasonable time to do this, but I'm not
certain about that.

Michael

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/