[Vorbis] Poor programming support

[Andrew Lentvorski]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 6:34 AM, levein <levein at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ogg format is great, but the programming support is so awful! After three
>> days, I still haven't managed to add a simple playback function to my
>> software. I know I can make it with a couple of more days, but it isn't
>> really worth it. BTW, I'm an very experienced programmer.
> 
> Now that you've mastered programming, you should work on your issue
> reporting skills: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

If your task matches some example code that exists, life is great.  If 
it doesn't, vorbis is a slog.

I needed to be able to do a non-preemptive suspend of a vorbis decode at 
fixed time consumption intervals in order to handle some other tasks and 
then resume the vorbis decode.  This is a fairly standard task for an 
MP3 decode library on embedded hardware.

It took quite a lot of work to tear open the vorbis library in a way 
that I could suspend and resume partial decodes where *I* wanted it 
rather than where libvorbis wanted it (libvorbis had no good latency 
guarantee and could wind up doing a *lot* of work before it was willing 
to return).

Vorbis documentation that would have helped me was definitely thin on 
the ground, too.

Perhaps this has changed as it's been a couple of years since I had to 
do that work.

-a