[vorbis] further development

[Stan Seibert]

On Sat, 2002-08-24 at 11:32, Robert Michel wrote:
> Would it be possible to reinclude a forked encoder into a common 
> encoder?
> 
> Can users on this list support or influence developer in choosing
> the next features?
> If yes, then it will be a long list of possible features and arguments
> about them to rank it most powerfull to make vorbis ogg populaire.
> I do agree, that speed is important, but I want to stress, that this
> is not the only criteria. If Vorbis Ogg hasn't reached a better 
> quality than MP3, it wouldn't get as much attentions as now.
> 
> So before we dispute on the first 2 features, what more features
> could be of interest, and why?

<p>Historically, the most interest in Vorbis has come from these groups (in
no particular order):

1) People who want to listen to music on their PC
2) People who want to stream music to Internet listeners
3) Developers who want to compress audio for games (there are several
games out there that already use Vorbis)
4) People who want to listen to music on their handheld devices

For 1 & 2, the quality/size ratio is very important.  Encoding speed is
important for 2.  Decoding speed is important for 3 and 4.  Latency for
most Internet streamers is not a big deal.

Telephony has been brought up a couple times in the past, and that would
require low latency plus a good quality/size ratio (plus maybe better
decoding speed for handheld devices).  I'm not a codec expert, but I
would suspect that improving latency would decrease quality (if for no
other reason than you would have less buffered audio to analyze). 
Additionally, telephony applications usually are interested in encoding
speech, which Vorbis is not optimized for.  Have you looked at Speex?
(http://speex.sf.net)  It is a speech codec which will probably have
much better compression on voice.  I don't know how the latency is on
it.

That said, interesting things might be accomplished by someone tinkering
with making a low latency Vorbis encoder.  However, my guess would be
that it would have to remain a fork.  That's alright, though.  As long
as it produced a valid Vorbis stream, the stock decoder (or any other
decoder, for that matter) would work just fine on it.


---
Stan Seibert

<p><p>--- >8 ----
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