[vorbis] Announce: VCE v0.1.1

[Michael Smith]

At 04:48 AM 2/11/01 -0800, you wrote:
>On Fri, 09 February 2001, "Warren Spits" wrote:
>> VCE is still lacking UTF-8 support. This is planned for the next release. I
>> have already got UTF-8/unicode working on my Windows 2000 box. I just need
>> to get Win 95/98/ME to work.
>
>Maybe this is a very stupid question, but in what does "8-bit UTF-8"
(v-comment.html) differ from ASCII + Extended ASCII?

7 bit ascii is a subset of UTF-8. 8 bit extended ascii isn't. Nor is
latin-1, for instance (which is much more common these days than 'extended
ascii'). 

UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding of 8 bit data, used to encode the full
unicode range whilst remaining backwards compatible with ascii.
Alternatives are UTF-16 (which windows (NT at least) uses internally. It's
also not fixed length, though for MOST uses it is), and a number of others
that are used less. 

The end effect of this is that if you give it comments with the high bit
set (i.e. not plain 7 bit ascii), it'll be encoded incorrectly. As a
result, correct decoders will display it differently from what you expect.
To my knowledge, freeamp is the only decoder that treats this properly. 

Really, we need to get proper UTF-8 support into all the players and
utilities. I want to do this for oggenc, but portability concerns make that
very difficult (on unix we can use iconv, but I'm not sure how portable
that is even between different unixes). 

For most of the players, it should be easier. Comment editing front-ends
are strongly encouraged to do the right thing. 

>
>All titles I read with vorbisfile seem ASCII to me.

That's because ascii is a subset of UTF-8. 

>> What is VCE?
>> VCE is a simple dialog based application that can edit the comments in
>> Vorbis (.ogg) files. Vorbis files can store a list of comments. Each
comment
>> is made up of name/value pairs. VCE allows the addition, removal,
>> modification and reordering of the comments.
>
>What about making the actual comment writing code LGPL and integrating it
into the vorbisfile API?

The basic structures of the two are too different to cleanly integrate.
However, as I've said, I'm willing to consider relicensing vcedit as LGPL
should the GPL licensing be preventing anyone from using it. Contact me
off-list if you want to discuss this. 

Michael

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.