Hi all: ;I wish to raise something that has, in my opinion, not been properly dealt with. With the iminent release of icecast2 and vorbis 1.0, I feel that it needs to be sorted out. The problem is that of how to launch an ogg stream from a web browser. In short, what metafile should be used, or do we need to invent our own? Let me illustrate the problem. Using MP3 streaming as an example, we have 2 options, PLS or M3U. On the face of it, PLS would seem to be the better choice, since it's not MP3 specific. However, a number of players do not respect/understand PLS files. It also means that whatever player you choose to play shoutcast-style MP3 streams launched with PLS files will have to be used to play OGG streams. Example: Say you run linux and have both ogg123 and freeamp. Now, you might prefer to play vorbis streams with ogg123, but if you want to be able to play MP3 streams with freeamp, then you'll have to associate PLS with freeamp and launch freeamp for both OGGs and MP3s. M3U has the kind of player support we would like - pretty much any MP3 player understands it. but therein lies the problem - M3U is MP3 specific (audio/MPEGURL). And again, apart from it being improper to use an MP3 construct for Vorbis, you hit the same problem as above - that being the need to use the same player for both. Given the above, I think we need an OGG specific meta file. OK, so it's yet another damned file type, but I don't really see that we have much choice if we want to retain flexibility. The only way around this would be to make an OGG bitstream format which acted just like a meta file (i.e. contained enough data to be a valid OGG stream plus the URL of the actual OGG stream). This would have the advantage of being able to be an .OGG file, but it would still have to be easily created and editable for webmasters to bother with it. Personally, I'm quite happy to type in a URL for ogg123, but people will want to be able to place links on webpages and many users will require this of a stream provider. So this issue needs to be sorted out and implemented quickly. Geoff. --- >8 ---- List archives: http://www.xiph.org/archives/ Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/ To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request@xiph.org' containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body. No subject is needed. Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.