[vorbis] Ogg Traffic for September 30, 2003

Carsten Haese carsten at uniqsys.com
Wed Oct 1 10:02:19 PDT 2003 


Hi everybody:

Here is the newest round of status updates from Xiph.org. The HTML
version is at http://www.vorbis.com/ot/20030930.html. Enjoy!

-Carsten

<p>Ogg Traffic for Tuesday, September 30, 2003

   Author:  Carsten "Purple" Haese
   Contact: [1]carsten at xiph.org
    Date:   September 30, 2003

   Table of Contents
     1   Status Updates
          1.1   Monty
          1.2   Jean-Marc Valin
          1.3   Stan Seibert
          1.4   Brendan Cully
          1.5   Chris Cheney
          1.6   Timothy Terriberry
          1.7   Ralph Giles
          1.8   Jack Moffitt
          1.9   Andrew Chatham
          1.10   Manuel Lora
     2   Recent Developments
           2.1   A Technical Introduction to Vorbis
           2.2   Speex Releases
           2.3   Xiph.org IRC is moving

   [2]Previous Issues of Ogg Traffic

1   Status Updates

1.1   Monty

   Monty did his share for the Vorbis 1.0.1 bugfix release, and he has
   moved on to more interesting things. He has started work on Vorbis
   1.1, which will feature a refined encoder model, not just tuning of
   existing parameters, and OggFile, among other goodies that will be
   announced at a later time.

   Fans of the Garf-tuned Vorbis encoder will be happy to hear that Monty
   is using Garf's work wherever he can.

   On the low bitrate side, Monty has some tricks up his sleeve to remedy
   known problems such as the high frequency boost and the poor
   performance on problem samples such as "Waiting."

1.2   Jean-Marc Valin

   Jean-Marc committed tons of changes to Speex leading up to the
   releases of Speex 1.0.2 and Speex 1.1. More about this below.

1.3   Stan Seibert

   Besides continuing work on positron, Stan checked in lots of bugfixes
   to libao and vorbis-tools. Most notably he added FLAC input support
   for oggenc, which will allow seamless transcoding from FLAC to Vorbis
   while preserving comments.

1.4   Brendan Cully

   Brendan fixed a typo in the ices autogen.sh script and corrected the
   Makefile in vorbis/doc to make building the documentation from outside
   the source directory work.

1.5   Chris Cheney

   Chris, master of the Debian packages, has sent in a ton of commits,
   consisting of version number updates and miscellaneous little bug
   fixes, in preparation for the Vorbis 1.0.1 release.

1.6   Timothy Terriberry

   Besides fixing a memory leak in Theora's comment handling and cleaning
   up the Theora colorspace indicator, Timothy took some time to analyze
   Mauricio Piacentini's VP3-to-Theora converter and made it work. His
   work proved two things: Lossless transcoding from VP3 to Theora is
   possible, but it requires Theora to (internally) change its coordinate
   system back to VP3's coordinate system.

1.7   Ralph Giles

   Ralph committed various odd, ends, and code cleanups to Vorbis and
   Theora, and he updated the MacOS Codewarrior project for Vorbis in
   anticipation of 1.0.1.

1.8   Jack Moffitt

   Jack is working on fixing up the Win32 Vorbis SDK, which is the only
   missing item for the Vorbis 1.0.1 bugfix release.

1.9   Andrew Chatham

   Andrew committed two patches to the pyvorbis python bindings. One
   fixes a file descriptor leak, and the other corrects an exception
   leak.

1.10   Manuel Lora

   Manuel committed a few corrections to the positron man pages.

2   Recent Developments

2.1   A Technical Introduction to Vorbis

   If you've ever tried to understand what's going on underneath the hood
   in Vorbis, but were daunted by reading the source code, this might
   help a bit. [3]Richard Felton reports that he has written a
   [4]technical introduction to the Vorbis encode and decode processes.

   Please note that this is a work in progress, and it's not guaranteed
   to be correct or complete. Richard would appreciate any feedback and
   corrections of errors and omissions.

2.2   Speex Releases

   In relatively short succession, Jean-Marc has cranked out two new
   releases of his [5]Speex voice codec. Jean-Marc uses Linux-style
   version numbering where odd numbers denote unstable development
   releases, and even numbers denote stable production releases.

   [6]Speex 1.1, the current unstable release, was released on September
   19, 2003, and includes many new features such as adaptive gain control
   and noise removal. Voice-over-IP applications that use libspeex
   directly will also have access to a jitter buffer and an echo
   cancellation function.

   [7]Speex 1.0.2, the most recent stable release, was released on
   September 24, 2003. This release fixes a few minor bugs, adds
   soundcard output for Solaris and BSD platforms, and includes a
   documentation update.

2.3   Xiph.org IRC is moving

   Ralph Giles [8]announced that the IRC server irc.xiph.org is being
   shut down, and all support channels that were hosted there have moved
   to irc.freenode.net. This does not mean that users can't come to IRC
   for help anymore. The same developers and long-time users are going to
   be available to answer questions and offer their help.
     _________________________________________________________________

   Ogg Traffic for September 30, 2003

References

   1. mailto:carsten at xiph.org
   2. http://www.vorbis.com/ot/
   3. http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis-dev/200309/0020.html
   4. http://www.geocities.com/gatewaystation/vorbis/vorbis.htm
   5. http://www.speex.org/
   6. http://www.xiph.org/archives/speex-dev/200309/0030.html
   7. http://www.xiph.org/archives/speex-dev/200309/0045.html
   8. http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis/200309/0121.html

--- >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.

More information about the Vorbis mailing list