Aaron Colwell, at real.com, has added support for chaining to the helix ogg
vorbis and theora plugins for RealPlayer 10.
According to j at thing.net, "to allow native editing of ogg theora files,
support for chained streams in the players is essential,"
Support for native editing of ogg theora files is essential to gain full
value of hardware encoded theora format video. An FPGA implementation of
the ogg theora codec is now at 60% complete.
When I asked j for further insights about native editing of ogg theora files,
he replied, "i am still waiting for the audio editor that would support
native ogg vorbis and would only encode changed parts, nothing, if you only
cut parts out, or add parts from another file. the most obvious way
to do this would be something using chained streams. to have something like
this that would work with ogg theora/vorbis, ogg theora/speex files would be
great. for xinole, which i mentioned in my last mail, it is planned, but no
code in sight."
Progress on all of these fronts is tantalizing, even exciting. I am
continually in awe of the work the developers of ogg and related projects are
doing.
Regards,
John