I have been a member of the mailing list for a couple months now. I have not contributed anything because it has been difficult to gain a toehold from which I could really understand the concepts used in Ogg Vorbis. I would like to help out, but it is hard to get an idea of the overall architecture with docs like http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/doc/vorbis.html , in which every link is dead. I'm not trying to point fingers or to say that it is bad documentation, it is just incomplete. The READMEs and doc/* included in the distribution offer little help with regard to the underlying principles. I understand that many of you already know a great deal about the inner workings of Ogg Vorbis. I do not nor do I know where to look to get such an understanding. I'm a good C/C++ coder with an MSEE concentration in DSP. I'd like to contribute to Ogg Vorbis, but so far I have not been able to motivate myself to spend hours looking through the code, just to get an overview of the technologies used. I wonder how many more people there are like me who are waiting in the wings; who'd like to contribute as a hobby, but can't devote 20 hours a week to the cause. Aside about the install: It took me a couple of hours just to get to the point where I could record and play a vorbis file on my linux box. That time could've been much better spent looking at the code, rather than wrestling with libraries and paths (I had to comment out some stuff that used esd if I remember correctly.) Of course it would be nice to have an install script do everything, but lacking that, a README that dealt with some of the common issues would do. I'm sorry if I have offended anyone. That was not my intent. I just wanted to express my frustration at not being able to help out very easily. Mark Borgerding markab (at) xetron . com Software Engineer Xetron Corporation <HR NOSHADE> <UL> <LI>application/octet-stream attachment: Mark_Borgerding__E-mail_.vcf </UL> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Mark_Borgerding__E-mail_.vcf Type: application/octet-stream Size: 247 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/vorbis-dev/attachments/20001116/9b403402/Mark_Borgerding__E-mail_-0001.obj
Thanks, Erik. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly read your pages yet. But from a quick scan, it seems like exactly what I was looking for. Now I have some good lunchtime reading material. :) I won't pretend I've used all the techniques involved, but I think I've got most of the basic tools needed to understand it: familiarity with DCT, and other time-to-frequency transforms (but new to MDCT); good knowledge of FIR and IIR filters; some familiarity with LPC (mainly through a Kalmann filter class). All in all, I'm hopeful I can grok the concepts with a few (dozen?) hours of study. You should talk to Monty about putting some of your pages on xiph.org. I think they would really help newbies who want to dig deeper into the internals. I hope you don't mind me CC'ing the mailing list. But I think there might be others on the list who feel as lost as me. They could really benefit from your pages.> -----Original Message----- > From: Erik Kruus [mailto:kruus@on2.com] > Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 12:56 AM > To: Borgerding, Mark A. > Subject: Re: [vorbis-dev] Documentation gripes > > > heh, you sound like I felt a month ago. > > i put some docs describing my frustrating code-plowing > at http://surf.chimie.uqam.ca/~kruus/vorbis/encoder/ > and a web-browser for the source at > http://surf.chimie.uqam.ca/~kruus/lxr/http/sourceI think this is the link you mean: http://surf.chimie.uqam.ca/~kruus/vorbis/lxr/http/source/> > (I think those are the URLS I can't even see what I'm > typing, myconnection is so slow now) > erik > >--- >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-dev-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.