[vorbis] Why is Vorbis development slow?

[Carsten Haese]

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 12:24, SwiftBiscuit wrote:
> Dropping the other topic as requested, I'd like to
> follow something up in a new thread. I want to throw a
> question or two out there and see what responses
> people give (if any ;-). 
> 
> Assuming that you think Vorbis could have developed
> faster than it has done in the past year, what in your
> opinion has been holding it back and what remedies do
> you suggest?

It was mostly held back by Monty working on Theora and portable Vorbis
playback. That no-one other than Monty has the detailed knowledge it
takes to make major improvements to Vorbis is unfortunate, but it's
nothing that Xiph can change directly.

> Speaking for myself, I think that it has not attracted
> enough enthusiastic people who come with the knowledge
> required to understand how to tune Vorbis.
> Remedy: Lower the difficulty level for tuning Vorbis.
> Suggestion: Create a How-To Tune Vorbis document that
> takes people step-by-step through the tuning process.

That would take a ton of time, and it's not guaranteed to attract
outside contributions. The source code is out in the open, and I find it
sufficiently clear to follow. Also, interested parties are always
welcome to ask specific questions, but they have to be specific, i.e.
Monty doesn't have time to answer broad questions like "How does
Vorbis's psychoacoustic model work?"

Improvements by third parties do happen, even without the documentation
you suggest. Garf's tuning is one example. The recent improvement to low
bitrate behavior on quiet signals is another one, and I found that one
with nothing other than the source code and some common sense.

Best regards,

Carsten Haese.

<p>--- >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.