[vorbis] Bitrate stripping?

[John Morton]

On Friday 02 January 2004 01:24, Daniel Schregenberger wrote:
>  On Don, 2004-01-01 at 23:08, John Morton wrote:
>  > On Thursday 01 January 2004 20:21, Graham Mitchell wrote:
>  > >  Once peeling is working out of the box, people will start using it
>  > > (and loving it, I suspect), but for now there's not enough clamor for
>  > > it to move to the top of the TODO list of anyone capable.
>  >
>  > And the longer it's left, the less useful it becomes, unfortunately.
>
>  Why that?

Bit peeling is all about helping you out if you have limited storage, 
bandwidth and cycles. 

In the storage case, it's a win for owners of portable players, as it would 
let you peel down your (say) q5 streams to q2 on the fly, so you can cram 
more into the portable player   - no transcoding, and no long term storage of 
duplicate streams. 

For streaming, it lets the stream source store one high quality stream and 
allows them to present it as lower quality streams that are streamable in 
realtime at 56k, 128k etc, and the bit peeling is, in principle, cheaper than 
encoding three or four separate outputs for live material. 

The problem is that the amount of storage, bandwidth and cycles you can buy 
for a dollar is always increasing, and shows no sign of letting up in the 
near future. Already the portables you can buy that that support vorbis come 
in 20gb configurations, which is about the size of my entire album 
collection, and I'm probably only a $1k computer upgrade away from making 
storage in FLAC and transcoding to vorbis a viable proposition. 

On the server side, the hardware with cycles enough to encode three or four 
bitrate streams on the fly isn't all that expensive, and again storage isn't 
too great a problem. In the mid term - say 5 years from now - I expect the 
market for 56k streams to seriously contract, such that you'd really only 
need to have 64k and maybe 96k streams for 128k bandwidth people, and q5-q7 
streams for everyone else. That doesn't help your bandwidth problem at the 
server end, but I  expect that IceShare will be the killer app to solve that 
problem. 

Basically, two years ago bit peeling would have been a killer app - 
potentially enough of  a feature to override the whole 'free does not 
compute' problem that vorbis has with the big corporate customers. Right now 
it would be one of a number of nice features vorbis has, along with comments 
that don't suck, easy replaygain support, better quality to size than most of 
the non-AAC competition. It might even be that way in a year, but two years 
from now? I think encoder optimizations, monster portables and IceShare will 
make it irrelevant for most people.

John

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