[vorbis] Vorbis newbie questions

[Geoff Shang]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Dave Phillips wrote:

> Greetings:
>
>   I'm writing an article for the O'Reilly Network, and the focus is on
> streaming audio with Linux. I would like to include material concerning
> Vorbis, but I need some information:

I don't have all the answers you want, but I can get you started with a
few.

>    1) What's up with www.vorbis.com and www.icecast.org ? Can anyone
> say when they'll be back on-line ?

Can't remember exactly what happened, someone pulled the plug on them
somehow sometime last week.  there was a message to the effect that it was
under control, but no word on exactly when they'd reappear.  That's one for
Jack to answer, probably.

>     2) Where should I go to get the latest Vorbis sources ?

The short answer is CVS.  Vorbis 1.0beta4 is due for release any day now,
but of course it's not going to happen while vorbis.com is down.  The
vorbis developer site is http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/ where you can get
nightly CVS snapshots and all that good stuff.

>     3) What players, encoders, etc currently support Vorbis ?

Oooooh.  Umm let me see what I can remember at 6Am.  Well there are the
tools that come with vorbis (i.e. oggenc and oggdrop encoders, ogg123
command line player, etc).  Also contained in vorbis-tools is a vorbis
input plugin for winamp, and Jack has recently added a vorbis plugin for
realplayer.  vorbis-tools also contained an xmms plugin, though this has
since been moved into the xmms project itself.  Apart from these, freeamp
now supports vorbis playback, and lame supports vorbis encoding.  The CD
ripper CDEX <?> supports vorbis, and there is vorbis support in goldwave as
well I think.  I think someone also recently wrote vorbis support for
cooledit.  I'm sure I've left stuff out.

>     4) What extra software exists for Vorbis ? (I'm thinking of things
> like the VCE I read about on this list).

Not a great deal yet, but this is because a lot of it is actually in the
vorbis-tools in the main distro.  Some are in development though.  I can't
think of any off the top of my head apart from VCE, though I'm sure there
are others.

>     5) Say I want to listen to a Vorbis stream: where can I go to
> connect to one on the net ? What player should I use ? If I use
> Netscape, how do I configure it ? Is there an Ogg Vorbis MIME type ?

Big question.  Firstly, AFAIC, you can't yet listen to a live stream on the
net because there aren't any (see icecast below).  There are (were)
downloadable samples at vorbis.com, and I think there are others on other
vorbis sites around the net.  there is a vorbis mime type,
application/x-ogg but this is a point of contention amongst the vorbis
community at present.  Exactly how streaming will be handled is yet to be
seen, perhaps with .pls files.  Most (all?) players/plugins support
streaming to one degree or other, though IMHO this can't be said to be
finalised until icecast 2 is ready and all players are compatibal with it.

>     6) What's up with Icecast 2.0 and Vorbis ?

Last I heard, icecast 2 was at prealpha stage.  Unless CVS has changed in
the last week or so, it's rather barebones with no docs yet.  And
icecast.org is down so you won't be getting at CVS that way right now
anyway.  Icecast is being completely rewritten for 2.0 and will stream
vorbis instead of MP3.  There is a link to another icecast page on the xiph
vorbis site, but I've not yet looked at it.

Hope this helps.

Geoff.

--- >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.