[vorbis] Proposal for Bitrate peeling.

[Andrew Snare]

Paul Wagland proposed:
> 2. Find some way to affect the priority of this option. I seem to 
> recall somewhere that Jack Moffitt said that priorities could be 
> influenced by money. Sadly I don't have the kind of money that I think 
> causes "influence" :-) But, I figure that a number of us together 
> might.

Arc Riley responded with:
> I'd prefer to see that same energy/money go for OggFile, which is
> really a huge milestone for everything else.

This is the first time such a connection has been made. Whilst I
may have missed something, I do follow the list and previously my
understanding was that OggFile had been positioned such that it
would mainly benefit Ogg accessors, not generators (such as oggenc)
per se. I also note that the most recent Ogg Traffic contained no
references to OggFile progress.

What I'm trying to highlight here is that we'd love to know more
about what's going on. At Xiph right now there do appear to be a
lot of projects coming along like Theora, OggFile, IceShare, etc.
What's not always clear is how they relate, in particular what
people hope to achieve by when and how it will help other areas.

> Also, note, that Monty has been throwing around the idea of a
> Vorbis II, which would be done sometime after OggFile and I believe
> I read that one of the things he wanted to improve on is adding
> bitrate peeling.

Ditto for this. Anyone outside of Xiph ever heard of VorbisII? That's
exciting stuff; help spread it. :)

Please note that I'm not intending to flame Xiph here; we're lucky
to have Ogg at all, and initiatives such as the existing Wiki and
OggTraffic are fantastic. It's hard to criticize a company such as
Xiph for not being open given they're an order of magnitude more
open than many many other companies. I guess I just feel that great
as Ogg is, it could be even better if the community was able to
contribute in a better manner. Something that seems to help in other
Free Software projects that I'm familiar with (linux kernel, python,
mozilla, apache to name a few) is that the community always has a
sense of the big picture and goals. I suppose this lets community
developers assess more effectively whether their changes are wanted,
and how/when best to go about them.

Paul's original email went on to propose:
> goal a. Document the changes required for bitrate peeling to be
> implemented. These changes should be documented to a level where a
> person with reasonable knowledge of the OGG Vorbis format could
> implement these changes.

This sounds quite reasonable. It's been mentioned in the past on
this mailing list that there is quite a high barrier to entry in
terms of knowledge required to get involved. The thing about peeling
is that it's exactly the kind of feature which someone would work
on themselves to scratch an itch. Unfortunately it always seems so
daunting that I imagine capable people are discouraged from even
having an exploratory look around to gauge how difficult it might
be.

As an example, it would be a huge leap forward for there to be a
list of tasks to accomplish to support peeling. It doesn't even
have to be detailed; just enough to point people in the right
direction if they want to have a go. Maybe a Wiki entry with a
top-down list of tasks that people can flesh out would be appropriate?

Just a few thoughts,

 - Andrew
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