[vorbis-dev] Some random thoughts

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

Dear all,

I hope you will forgive me for posting without lurking, and indeed,
without even being subscribed to the list.

Let me first say that efforts such as Ogg shows there is still a lot of
good in mankind, this is truly a great effort!

While I haven't been lurking, I've been looking through the archives to
see if this stuff has been discussed before, and I have also tried to read
the docs, but a few files aren't there yet. That's OK.

My primary reason for writing, is a really mindblowing lecture I attended
a few weeks ago, given by Professor Jaan Pelt of Tartu Observatory in
Estonia. Professor Pelt argued "don't sample regularily!" If you sample
regularily, you are limited by the Nyquist theorem, but you're not if
you don't, so given a finite number of sampling points, you should sample
here and there instead of regularily. Research has also been done to
figure out an optimal sampling strategy. I have very little training in
signal processing, but it occured to me that this should have applications
in sound compression. He said that the mathematical basis for this has
been known for a few decades but that the principles has seen surprisingly
little use in astronomy, physics, computer science and so on (himself (and
I) being an astronomer). I thought I'd pass on the idea, just in case...

I guess many Vorbis streams have been sampled long before a Vorbis encoder
sees them, either being WAV files, or ripping from CDs. In that case, I
thought that one might compress by actually using an irregular subset of
the samples, and yet be able restore the sound with good quality. Just a
thought.

I've been reading a few posts on MIME types in the archives, and I wonder
if it has been discussed registering the MIME type with IANA? It seems a
natural thing to do at this stage...? So, instead of application/x-ogg,
get application/ogg for it. I found some useful information about
registering at <URL:http://www.alvestrand.no/harald/ietf/media-types.html>
I understand there is a great discussion on whether multiple MIME types
should be used... Well, I like the sound of audio/vorbis.... :-)

Finally, has any thought been given to the possibility of getting the W3C
to recommend Vorbis like they did with PNG? Well, it doesn't seem to have
helped the adoption of PNG a lot, but it's a thought.

Keep up the great work!

Best,

Kjetil

-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Graduate astronomy-student                    Problems worthy of attack
University of Oslo, Norway            Prove their worth by hitting back
E-mail: kjetikj at astro.uio.no                                - Piet Hein
Homepage <URL:http://www.astro.uio.no/~kjetikj/>
Webmaster at skepsis.no

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