[vorbis] Why is Vorbis development slow?

[John Ripley]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: engdev [mailto:engdev at bigpond.net.au]
> Sent: 30 September 2003 07:09
> To: vorbis at xiph.org
> Subject: Re: [vorbis] Why is Vorbis development slow?
> 
> OK, OK, I get the message. I was only 'following up' with my 
> thoughts which
> were provoked by a user wishing to write his own 
> implementation, only to be
> told to refer to the code. This is not what he wanted, he 
> wanted to create
> from 'scratch' if you like, from the documentation.
> 
> This was several months back. I never saw him on this list 
> again - I assume he gave up and "copied" the code.

I've done my own "from scratch" implementation, as have one or two others
here I think. I think you're being a little unfair on the documentation. It
took me only a few days about 6 months ago to get it all working, and there
was only one section which was obviously in error (the residue packet
decode). For that I had to look at the libvorbis source code to figure out
where the pseudocode was wrong, and I only lost an hour or so over it.

After that there were still differences in decoding, so I used tons of debug
output from libvorbis to figure out where mine was doing something
different. No surprises there - that's exactly why you get "reference"
decoders.

Basically, I can see very little lacking in documentation or in the quality
of the reference codec. If there's a reason people aren't adopting Vorbis
it's not because of that. I suggest it's probably more to do with support
and testing costs, and not to mention the usual lack of time.

In case anyone's interested, my decoder is at http://www.pslam.demon.co.uk -
it's a lot cleaner now, but still not entirely complete. It's mostly an
experiment in how light-weight I can get it.

- John Ripley.
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