[Vorbis] Vorbis for non audio stream

[Michael Smith]

On 7/11/05, vincenzo cacciatore <vincenzo.cacciatore at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
> I would like to use Ogg-Vorbis to encode a non audio waveform. My
> waveform is in .wav format, on 16 bit mono, with frequency range from
> 100Hz to 100MHz. It's about 100MB lenght.
> I need to compact it with lossy for net transfer.
> Is there something like this, already done, that can help me ??
> How can I measure the distortion that Vorbis introduce?

Given the frequency range of your data, vorbis is almost certainly
completely useless to you.

Vorbis is meant to compress audio data in such a way that the human
ear can't hear the difference - the distortions that occur from this
are extremely complex, and difficult to usefully characterise for
non-audio purposes.

One significant distortion you'd encounter is that the human ear can't
hear anything above around about 20 kHz (depending on the ear...) -
vorbis won't reproduce anything above a certain frequency (depending
on the specific bitrate you use), so with a signal going up to 100
MHz, very little of your data will survive.

I also don't think the reference encoder will accept such high
frequencies. You could lie to it, but since vorbis is so inappropriate
to this sort of task, it's unlikely to be worthwhile.

Mike