[vorbis] Vorbis determined to be as good as MPC at 128 kbps!

[noprivacy at earthlink.net]

From: "Michael Smith" <msmith at xiph.org>

> On Tuesday 25 May 2004 00:59, noprivacy at earthlink.net wrote:
> > over what the current Xiph version is.  The Xiph version will always be
the
> > low quality 'reference' design, and never the 'high quality, highly
tuned'
> > one that consumers should actually use.
>
> This is very unfair. We welcome third-party development of new and better

I don't think it's unfair.

It's been commented in here and by Monty numerous times that it's expected
that third party people will be the ones to do the tunings, and that the
official one is just that, the 'official' one.  Not the best etc.

And just look at Garf's tunnings.  Perhaps not perfect, but better than the
ref design, but Monty was 100% unwilling to put those improvements into the
official version, or even let Garf help merge it into the official one.

The Garf tunings weren't perfect, no.  But Monty was unwilling to even
consider joint tuning / development so that higher bit rates could be
improved.

In fact, Monty's resistance and refusal is the stated sole reason that Garf
ended up giving up and totally abandoning the Vorbis format.  It takes a lot
of frustration for an early major supporter like that to just give up.

> encoders - but in many cases we'll (eventually) fold changes back in.
Whilst
> it's true that as the 'reference encoder' _speed_ (in terms of things like
> highly platform-specific optimisations) isn't a real goal, high quality
is.

I have to strongly disagree with that.

It's been commented officially too many times that Xiph expects other people
to develop their own versions & tunnings, and that those 3rd party
improvements will not be put into the official encoder.

It's more than a little unrealistic to expect that Monty is going to manage
to develop his own tunings that just happen to be the best, and do so
without any help from any other people.

So, unless Xiph & Monty actively embraces other developers and sets up a
process where their changes can be folded into the official version, it's
not going to improve much compared to the third party ones.

Not every change they make will be better, no.  But there needs to be a
willingness by Xiph to fold the real improvements into the reference
version, and a process by which developers can submit potential
improvements.  Xiph has neither.

And that's why so many people tend to call these other versions "forks"
because they tend to feel that those improvements will never ever be put
into the official code.

<p>> So, right now, for some range of bitrates, it's likely there are better
> encoders. That doesn't mean the official reference encoder is never the
best
> one, nor does it mean that it won't become (again) the best at any
particular
> bitrate range.

Considering the speed of past development, and that focus is now on Theora
and Vorbis-II, I think the odds are extremely remote that the Xiph version
will ever match, much less surpass, the already existing third party tuned
versions.  Xiph's attitudes towards Voribs has always been "We made the
specs and provided sample code.  Improving it is your job."

<p>Maybe things have changed.  If so, Xiph and the Voribs team have a lot of
developer relations damage to undo.

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