[vorbis] Ogg Traffic for March 31, 2003

[Carsten Haese]

Hi Everybody:

Below is this week's Ogg Traffic in plain text. The HTML version is available at
http://www.vorbis.com/ot/20030331.html

Enjoy!

Ogg Traffic for Monday, March 31, 2003

[1]Carsten "Purple" Haese

   March 31, 2003
     _________________________________________________________________

   Table of Contents

   1. Status Updates

        1.1. Monty
        1.2. Michael Smith
        1.3. Brendan Cully
        1.4. Karl Heyes
        1.5. Jean-Marc Valin

   2. Recent Developments

        2.1. Tremor Improvements
        2.2. Nero Ogg Vorbis plugin
        2.3. New Software
        2.4. New (Experimental) Bitrate Peeler Available

   [2]Previous Issues of Ogg Traffic

1. Status Updates

1.1. Monty

   In a flurry of CVS activity, Monty has completed the tedious
   libogg2-zerocopy rewrite of the memory management for the Ogg framing
   layer. He then proceeded to deploy the new memory management in
   Tremor, along with the recent vorbisfile fixes and optimizations. Read
   more about this below.

1.2. Michael Smith

   Mike was busy as always and added 24 bit input support to oggenc,
   fixed ices build problems, addressed various icecast bugs, and added
   two new admin commands to icecast for killing clients by id and for
   killing sources.

   Mike is also consistently one of the most active team members on the
   mailing list, helping users with various Icecast and Vorbis related
   problems. Thanks, Mike!

1.3. Brendan Cully

   Brendan committed more ices code cleanups and took a first stab at
   making YP support in icecast optional. Since YP support depends on
   libcurl, this would allow people that don't have libcurl and don't
   need YP support to still build icecast.

1.4. Karl Heyes

   Karl committed various cleanups, autotools tweaks and build fixes to
   ices and libshout.

1.5. Jean-Marc Valin

   Since [3]Speex 1.0 was released just last week, there was no CVS
   activity for Speex, but Jean-Marc already has plans for future
   developments. He has been seen on the IRC channel thinking out loud
   about possibilities for integer-only implementations of the Speex
   encoder and decoder.

2. Recent Developments

2.1. Tremor Improvements

   As mentioned above, Monty has completed the libogg2-zerocopy redesign
   of the Ogg memory management code. In a nutshell, this new memory
   management cuts buffering of stream data to an absolute minimum and
   eliminates lots of memory copies between framing layers. This ought to
   be useful for applications with high data rates (e.g. [4]Video), and
   it might give a performance boost on embedded platforms with slow
   memory. Because of its usefulness in embedded applications, the
   libogg2 memory management has been merged into Tremor, the
   integer-only Vorbis decoder library.

   Along with this, Monty has merged his recent vorbisfile fixes and
   seeking optimizations into Tremor. As he states [5]in this message,
   the changes have passed basic unit testing, but unit testing can't
   replace real-world testing by lots of people. If you'd like to help,
   please grab the latest copy of Tremor and bang on it!

2.2. Nero Ogg Vorbis plugin

   Various versions of this plugin have been floating around the Net for
   a while (the first version was sighted mere days after Nero's SDK
   became available), but now it seems to have found a sufficiently
   stable home. The Ogg Vorbis plugin for Nero can be downloaded [6]from
   this page, along with plugins for FLAC and other codecs.

2.3. New Software

   A new title has been added to the [7]Software section at
   [8]vorbis.com. The new addition is [9]CAJUN, which is a project that
   allows you to turn an old PC into a car or home jukebox. Written in
   Perl, CAJUN supports keypads, infra-red remote controls, LCD/VFD
   displays, FM cards, CD players, Ogg Vorbis, Shoutcast/Icecast streams,
   GPS devices, and other goodies.

2.4. New (Experimental) Bitrate Peeler Available

   Just when I wanted to submit this Ogg Traffic, Segher informed me that
   he has finished a new experimental bitrate peeler. (A bitrate peeler
   is a tool that reduces a Vorbis file to a smaller bitrate without
   decoding and reencoding.)

   You can read his announcement and download the code [10]here. Please
   note that the code is experimental. Give it a whirl and let Segher
   know if you have any problems.

References

   1. mailto:carsten at xiph.org
   2. http://www.vorbis.com/ot/
   3. http://www.speex.org/
   4. http://www.theora.org/
   5. http://www.xiph.org/archives/tremor/200303/0017.html
   6. http://neroplugins.cd-rw.org/
   7. http://www.vorbis.com/softwarenews.psp
   8. http://www.vorbis.com/
   9. http://www.cajun.nu/
  10. http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis-dev/200303/0085.html
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