[vorbis] Ogg Traffic for June 24, 2003
Carsten Haese
carsten at uniqsys.com
Tue Jun 24 19:30:45 PDT 2003
Here is the latest round of status updates and recent developments from the
Xiph.org team. The HTML version is at http://www.vorbis.com/ot/20030624.html
Enjoy!
-Carsten
<p>Ogg Traffic for Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Author: Carsten "Purple" Haese
Contact: [1]carsten at xiph.org
Date: June 24, 2003
Table of Contents
1 Status Updates
1.1 Monty
1.2 Stan Seibert
1.3 Jean-Marc Valin
1.4 Ed Zaleski
1.5 Brendan Cully
1.6 Karl Heyes
1.7 Mauricio Piacentini
1.8 Ralph Giles
1.9 Timothy Terriberry
1.10 Manuel Lora
1.11 Jack Moffitt
2 Recent Developments
2.1 Positron 1.0
2.2 Speex 1.0.1
2.3 Theora Alpha 2
2.4 libshout2 beta 1
2.5 Speex ACM codec (Beta)
2.6 Integer Speex
2.7 OggHelp.com launched
2.8 Virgin Radio launches Ogg Stream
[2]Previous Issues of Ogg Traffic
1 Status Updates
1.1 Monty
Monty reports that an end to the Neurosetta project is in sight. There
are still some optimizations to be done, but Monty's firmware has been
reported to play Oggs in real time with only occasional skipping.
1.2 Stan Seibert
Stan finished up and released Positron 1.0 with support for Ogg Vorbis
files and lots of miscellaneous bugfixes regarding Unicode conversion,
sorting, and MP3 header parsing.
1.3 Jean-Marc Valin
Jean-Marc applied a few minor bugfixes to Speex, and fixed a major bug
that produced essentially broken wideband files. The result is a Speex
1.0.1 bugfix release which is announced below.
1.4 Ed Zaleski
Ed fixed a small Icecast bug in the Windows-specific code for checking
for regular file type.
1.5 Brendan Cully
Among lots of bug fixes to icecast and ices, Brendan has committed a
ton of changes to the libshout 2 build system to get it ready for
release.
1.6 Karl Heyes
Karl committed a few ices and icecast bugfixes, and sent in a round of
FreeBSD build patches and a patch that enables IPv6 for libshout.
1.7 Mauricio Piacentini
Mauricio updated his experimental Theora player in preparation for the
Theora alpha 2 release. The player recognizes the specified cropping
rectangle, and has been updated to build in a cross-platform
environment from the same source files.
1.8 Ralph Giles
Ralph was extremely busy with the Theora alpha 2 release and committed
lots and lots of fixes and improvements to the Theora libraries and
encoder/player examples. He also found time to work on the ogg-tools
to get MNG support into oggmerge and oggplay.
1.9 Timothy Terriberry
Timothy cleaned up large chunks of Theora code in his ongoing project
to make the code reentrant, and to eliminate dead code and
uninitialized variables.
1.10 Manuel Lora
Manuel helped Stan with the Positron 1.0 releasing by making the
necessary changes to the man page and README files.
1.11 Jack Moffitt
Jack once again assisted Stan by updating various packaging rules,
making actual packages, and making other miscellaneous updates.
2 Recent Developments
2.1 Positron 1.0
As this [3]message reports, [4]Positron 1.0 was released on June 19,
2003. Positron 1.0 support basic file synchronization, including Ogg
Vorbis support, even though the firmware for enabling Ogg Vorbis on
the device is not quite complete yet. Features like HiSi are on the
[5]roadmap for future releases.
2.2 Speex 1.0.1
[6]Jean-Marc announced that he made a Speex 1.0.1 bugfix release. The
most significant change in this release is the fix to a major bug that
affects Speex's wideband mode. Unfortunately, 1.0 encoded files will
be adversely affected when decoded with the corrected decoder, so
users of the wideband mode are strongly encouraged to reencode their
content.
2.3 Theora Alpha 2
Ralph Giles [7]informs us that Theora finally reached the Alpha 2
milestone on June 9th. Due to new features such as arbitrary frame
sizes and a colorspace flag, as well as new header structures with
codebooks and comments, alpha 2 files are incompatible with alpha 1,
so any alpha 1 content will have to be reencoded. Also note that while
we hope that no incompatible bitstream changes will be necessary, we
don't guarantee that alpha 2 streams will be decodable with future
versions. Backwards compatibility will be maintained beginning with
the beta 1 release.
2.4 libshout2 beta 1
Brendan Cully [8]announced that libshout 2, the Icecast 2 streaming
library has gone beta. libshout 2 includes support for Icecast 2, Ogg
streaming, and IPv6. The Ogg and Vorbis libraries are now required for
building libshout 2. Please download the [9]tarball, build it on as
many platforms as you can, and report any problems to
[10]http://bugs.xiph.org.
2.5 Speex ACM codec (Beta)
Christian Buchner reports that he has released a Beta version of his
ACM (Audio Compression Manager) implementation of the Speex codec. The
ACM codec should allow any ACM-aware Windows application to work with
Speex data embedded in WAV-files, and it supposedly should allow
Netmeeting to use Speex with [11]proper plumbing.
2.6 Integer Speex
After releasing the Speex ACM codec, Christian embarked on [12]another
journey whose completion should help Speex adoption a great deal: An
integer implementation that will help implementing Speex on portable
devices that don't have a lot of processing power. This is an
important project for Speex, and we wish Christian good luck on this
journey!
2.7 OggHelp.com launched
Dustin Smith [13]brings to our attention that he has launched a
website, [14]http://www.ogghelp.com, which is a portal for articles,
links, and support for everything related to Ogg Vorbis. Please don't
hesitate to contact Dustin if you would like to help him by
contributing articles, links, or suggestions.
2.8 Virgin Radio launches Ogg Stream
James Cridland [15]points out that Virgin Radio has recently launched
an Ogg Vorbis stream. It can be accessed from [16]this page and comes
in bandwidths of 32kbps and 96kbps. This stream is likely to increase
awareness of Ogg among the less informed, and if you have friends that
are not yet convinced of Vorbis's quality, this stream might just
change their minds!
_________________________________________________________________
Ogg Traffic, 2003 June 24
References
1. mailto:carsten at xiph.org
2. http://www.vorbis.com/ot/
3. http://www.xiph.org/archives/neurosetta/200306/0004.html
4. http://www.xiph.org/positron/
5. http://wiki.xiph.org/PositronTodo
6. http://www.xiph.org/archives/speex-dev/200306/0017.html
7. http://www.xiph.org/archives/theora/200306/0001.html
8. http://www.xiph.org/archives/icecast/5295.html
9. http://xiph.org/~brendan/beta/libshout-2.0b1.tar.gz
10. http://bugs.xiph.org/
11. http://www.xiph.org/archives/speex-dev/200306/0066.html
12. http://www.xiph.org/archives/speex-dev/200306/0055.html
13. http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis/200306/0126.html
14. http://www.ogghelp.com/
15. http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis/200306/0114.html
16. http://www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/listen/ogg.html
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