[vorbis] Transparent Video Codec

[Corey Miller]

On Monday, February 17, 2003, at 02:27 AM, Corey Miller wrote:
> *NOTE: I am answering questions asqui asked in a private e-mail about 
> set top boxes.  Since it started with me talking about the use of ogg 
> in a set top box project, I am posting it here, and there is some very 
> relevant information I would like to discuss.  Since most of what I 
> could say about it is irrelevant to this board, I answered most of the 
> questions in this post, and will soon send another post that has the 
> information more relevant to vorbis.  Plus, asqui, horrible apologies 
> if for some reason you didn't want everyone to see this e-mail, I 
> should have asked first but it's 2 AM and I need sleep.
And this is that second post containing all of the information both 
more relevant to this mailing list and that I think it's subscribers 
will be more interested in and also questions they will be able to do a 
good job of answering.  As promised, this will have a lot to do with 
ogg and the vorbis format.  Most of this is explanation as to why I 
need these questions answered, but I REALLY need the questions answered 
so to make things easier on people, I enclosed lines with important 
questions in --*this*--.  Lol, sorry, that sounds a little demanding, 
but if you can answer any of my questions I would be very grateful.

        Ok, since I am getting the large hard drive for the server to store 
all of my media from music to movies on, I am going to start my huge 
archive.  I have to write a lot of software and scripts to make it all 
easy to use and professional looking.  So I need some advice.  One of 
the first things I'd be making is a simple script to quickly rip any 
movies or music from a CD or DVD, and the music will be encoded using 
ogg vorbis.  Since all of my media will be stored on this huge media 
file server I won't have access to my entire library if I'm not on my 
network... so I was wondering also going to write a program (or script, 
or incorporate this into one of my other programs) that would decide on 
which songs I'd like to currently listen to (plus I'd be able to add 
manually to that list) and have those songs transferred to my laptop.
        I also have a 20 gig MP3 player (archos jukebox) and if it will 
support ogg soon I'll have that script keep my entire collection 
constantly up to date on that too.  For now I'd probably have to add in 
some part of the the script that would re-encode my oggs into mp3s 
before sending it to that.  But if it did support ogg soon, I'd want to 
be able to peel my vorbis files before sending them because my music 
collection could quite easily grow beyond 20 gigs and the USB 
connection is slow, so it would take a long time to send large files.
        What the long explanation that is the previous paragraph is leading up 
to is....  I'd like to know some things about the feasibility of what I 
just said.

--*How long until ogg will support peeling?  Can I start encoding my 
files now and when peeling support is added will I be able to peel my 
old files?  Or will I have to re-encode them?  Does anyone have any 
information about if/when the archos jukebox will support ogg vorbis?*--

<p>        Since I'm not in the mood to completely write my own players, but I'm 
writing a nice little graphical shell for all of the functions of my 
set top box.... I'm basically making the shell operate certain terminal 
functions.

--*For the playback of ogg files I would really like a nice visualizer 
(because this whole thing will obviously be hooked up to a TV, so that 
would look nice) and I'd really like a playlist.  Are there any command 
line ogg players that have both of these functions?  Are there other 
ways to add a visualizer, like are there any standalone command line 
visualizers?  How hard is it to create a pseudo-playlist (like just a 
big list of songs organized based on tags, names, or directories)?  If 
I used a standalone visualizer, made my own playlist system, etc. what 
is the best command line media player that supports vorbis?  The 
machine I'm using is fairly powerful so if a player is kinda bloated or 
inefficient it's not a huge loss, but what are the best command line 
vorbis players for things like, the most fast clean and efficient, the 
easiest, most customizable, supports the most other formats, etc.*--

<p>        --*I don't really NEED other formats, except speex, because that's 
what I was planning on encoding my audio books into, so which command 
line players do/can (in the future, with simple modifications to the 
source, or with plug-ins) support speex?*--
It wouldn't be any problem if I had to use two different players for 
vorbis and speex, I'm probably going to make the way you access them 
completely different too.  I'm hoping to have a nice easy to use 
playlist system for music, but for books

--*I'm hoping to have a small scrollable list that takes up at MOST a 
half of the screen, but probably less, sorted by author, genre, or 
whatever, then when you select one, even if you don't hit play, on the 
other half of the screen it'll have some things I can probably get 
offline or in some cases type myself.  For example a description of the 
book, some reader reviews,  a picture of the cover of the book, etc.  
For this I will PROBABLY have something like a text file with an index 
of the books, maybe in XML but more likely just something I make up to 
give the info for each like what picture to draw etc.  But is there an 
easier way to do this?  Are there tags that speex could use that could 
work well for these purposes?  How would I go about adding my own 
tag?*--

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