[vorbis] Bitrate stripping?

[Graham Mitchell]

> I heard some discussion a while back about "bitrate stripping" to reduce
> filesize without re-encoding ... has this gone anywhere?

Well, since no one else has answered this by now, the answer is "no."

* It's still possible to peel current Vorbis files, but not very well, and no 
peeler exists (except for Segher's "April Fool's" proof-of-concept code).

* It's possible to losslessly reorganize current Vorbis files to make them 
able to peel quite well, but no tool to do so exists.

* Superbly-peelable files would need hinting during the encoding process, and 
no one has made the necessary modifications to oggenc.

Basically the two folks mostly likely to work on peeling are Monty and 
Segher, and it just hasn't been a high enough priority for either of them to 
spend the time on it.  Peeling would be really cool, but since Vorbis is the 
only format to support it, everyone who'd really be able to use it already 
has workarounds for mp3, RealAudio, WMA, etc., so it's fairly trivial for 
them to just use similar workarounds for Vorbis.

Once peeling is working out of the box, people will start using it (and 
loving it, I suspect), but for now there's not enough clamor for it to move 
to the top of the TODO list of anyone capable.


-- 
Graham Mitchell - computer science teacher, Leander High School
Grahammitchell.net.  "It's dot com!"
	-- paraphrasing Homestar Runner

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