[Vorbis-dev] Vorbis, ambisonics and 'Vorbis Tools'

[e deleflie]

All,

Progress has been made on the proposed draft spec for integrating
ambisonics into vorbis. We are not yet finished (should be soon), but
you can see the progress here:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df4dtw69_3626qqq6st

The issue we have hit now concerns how/who would implement the
encoding and decoding in Vorbis Tools. Because ambisonics uses
spherical harmonic components, an ambisonic file could contain
anything from 3 channels up to (potentially) 16 and more channels.
Both encoding and decoding would then be error prone to getting the
right channels in the right place with the right metadata.

My question is, how should we approach Vorbis Tools ... would the
ambisonics community write their own encoding tools? ... does Vorbis
Tools *have* to contain support for ambisonics? Would the ambisonics
community write code to roll into Vorbis tools? Should we spec this
out, or leave it to the better intuition of the vorbis devs?

In the draft spec, we have begun specing this out in Section 1.7 ...
but some of our members feel strongly that this should not be in
there.

Etienne