[Vorbis] Proposal for Ambisonics format in vorbis comment.

[Ian Malone]

On 30 November 2015 at 20:57, Martin Leese
<martin.leese at stanfordalumni.org> wrote:
> "Gabriel I." wrote:
>
>> Greetings,
>>

Olá. Hope everyone is well, thought I'd interject.

>> I apologize if I posted this in the wrong list, I wasn't sure where to post
>> it, but seeing as the tags are called "vorbis comments" I thought vorbis,
>> rather than ogg-dev, would be the right choice. (actually, I'm not even a
>> developer anyway)
>
> Hi Gabriel,
>
> I doubt whether the Xiph community would
> promote a file format for Ambisonics without
> first seeing whether it had the support of the
> Ambisonic community *and* seeing it used in
> the wild.  The Ambisonic crowd all hang out on
> the sursound list,(1) so you should post your
> proposal over there.  (Links have been
> collected together at the end.)  However, there
> was a heated discussion in August/September
> 2008 on that list about a new file format.
> Despite several hundred posts, no consensus
> emerged.  My guess is that nobody over there
> has the stomach for another round (I know I
> don't).  This also might explain why you
> received no replies when you posted your
> proposal on the Ambisonics list.(2)  (So many
> lists.)
>

>>
>> Would acknowledging such a tag as official format be much trouble and to be
>> added to the spec?
>
> Adding new VorbisComment tags to the Vorbis
> spec does not happen lightly; Xiph has an
> official policy of neglect with respect to tags.
> Back in July 2009 Xiph *asked* me to survey
> what tags were being used in the wild, and to
> propose additions to the Vorbis spec.(8)  Even
> these were not added.  (Me, bitter and twisted?
> Never!)
>

While that list wasn't officially added, it does see use. One thing
that did get acceptance (to some degree) was the
METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE (and I've seen others of the proposed list in
use), this was probably because there was interest from a developer in
actually using it. I think that's key. Apple or Microsoft (and google
to some extent) can just put a new feature in their next version of a
product and automatically most of their user base is using it. For
open formats it's a bit different, I think the important thing for
someone wanting to make this happen (not knowing the ambisonics world)
would be to find a developer behind a commonly used system and get
them interested.

As to the details, an oggskeleton and an embedded metadata stream
(maybe XML, maybe binary) would be the purest way of doing it. But you
might find it's easier to sell a comment based one. The overwhelming
explosion of bad unstructured metadata (like early mp3), which I think
probably led Xiph to be cautious about comment contents early on never
really made it to Ogg and seems to have tailed off now that more media
comes through 'official' channels. Either way good test samples are
very useful, being able to prepare those is important.

I guess ambisonics is probably a relatively small community? Do you
need full hardware solutions or do people mainly drive hardware from
open software?

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk