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

[Conrad Parker]

2008/10/30 Christopher Montgomery <xiphmont at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 7:49 AM, e deleflie <edeleflie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>
> Note that I'm responding before reading the above... I need too, just
> daon't have the spare cycles to concentrate on it now :-(
>
>> 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?
>
> This is actually something I want to tackle myself.  And my instinct
> is that I would like first class support for Ambisonics across the
> Vorbis toolchain.  Ambisonics is where my professional life and
> hobbies meet, so I look forward to having some time to really get lost
> in it :-(
>
> Assuming I ever get to do that.  Uninterrupted thinking time is always
> the rub these days.
>
> Nor do I mean to imply I want to 'take this over', just that I want to
> fully lend my own shoulders to pushing ahead.

so the functionality should go into vorbis-tools.

Perhaps a good way forward would be for the ambisonics community to
create a branch of vorbis-tools now, to implement these features to
the specification they have produced. That will give everyone
something to play with, so that it can be reviewed for merging into
the trunk release.

Conrad.