[vorbis] Debian mp3->vorbis transcoding

[Jonathan Stewart]

Stan Seibert wrote:

>Are there any suggestions for a "unofficial standard" transcoding
>marker?  Perhaps just a Vorbis comment:
>
>TRANSCODED=Freeform string describing previous encoding
>
>Example:
>
>TRANSCODED=192kbps MP3
>
Stan, i think your message is the most very reasonable, and a good idea. 
 I'd like to add a couple of thoughts.

Frist, I think it is now evident that people want to, and *will* 
transcode mp3's into Ogg Vorbis files. Fighting this fact and saying it 
should never be allowed to happen is not productive whatsoever, IMO.  So 
what is to be done?

The Ogg Vorbis community should provide users with a way to transcode 
mp3's into Vorbis. Why?  Because it would give us an opportunity to 
educate the users.  If you imagine a future where people are moving away 
from mp3's in great numbers, and transcoding their mp3's into Vorbis, 
then I think that it's better if the Vorbis community is providing the 
tools, rather than someone else. If the 'standard' tool is a Xiph tool, 
then people will just use the Xiph tool, instead of an independantly 
produced tool.  This would give us the opportunity to educate users 
about what transcoding does to the sound files and make them think twice 
before going ahead. Secondly, if the transcoder generated a TRANSCODED 
flag, hopefully the TRANSCODED tag would become standard, and any other 
transcoders (from MusicMatch for example) would adopt the same policy of 
generating the TRANSCODED flag. Playback software might also flag the 
file on playback to alert the user.

The issue here, as I see it, is that the Vorbis community feels like 
they would be cheated if transcoding were common. The public's opinion 
of Vorbis would be lessened not by the fault of the codec itself, but 
because of foolish users. Thus, Vorbis would be cheated out of support 
because on the false assumption that a transcoded file is the best 
quality Vorbis offers.

However, because transcoding is possible, and also unpreventable, I 
think the best solution would be to mitigate the negative effects of 
this, by encouraging the use of a TRANSCODED tag, to inform people that 
this is not a true example of Vorbis' capability.

So let's imagine a user (male :) who wants to transcode mp3's to Vorbis:
User wants to transcode, but doesn't have the tools.  So he searches 
google, or something similar. He finds a page, that links him to the 
tool at Xiph's webiste. However, once there he finds a stern warning, 
telling him that unless he really know what he's doing, he should not do 
this. He reads, and understand what he's getting into, and goes ahead. 
 The resulting Ogg Vorbis files aren't of the best quality, but reason 
is made known by the TRANSCODED tag.

This is getting long, so i'll stop myself here. :)  But I think that the 
above situation would be much better than the current situation, which 
seems to be that the user doesn't know what he's doing, and when he 
asks, he get curt, perhaps harsh answers which say "Don't do it", 
without a full explanation.  And then if he does do it, no one (meaning 
you and I) has any way of identifying the output.

Jonathan

P.S. A TRANSCODED tag would also be useful for identifying all sorts of 
transcoding that will occur, like DVD (AC3) to Vorbis, or MiniDisc to 
Vorbis. The situation driving both these transcodings are pretty easily 
concieved.

--- >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.