Hi everybody: Here is the newest round of status updates from Xiph.org. The HTML version is at vorbis.com/ot/20030930.html. Enjoy! -Carsten <p>Ogg Traffic for Tuesday, September 30, 2003 Author: Carsten "Purple" Haese Contact: [1]carsten@xiph.org Date: September 30, 2003 Table of Contents 1 Status Updates 1.1 Monty 1.2 Jean-Marc Valin 1.3 Stan Seibert 1.4 Brendan Cully 1.5 Chris Cheney 1.6 Timothy Terriberry 1.7 Ralph Giles 1.8 Jack Moffitt 1.9 Andrew Chatham 1.10 Manuel Lora 2 Recent Developments 2.1 A Technical Introduction to Vorbis 2.2 Speex Releases 2.3 Xiph.org IRC is moving [2]Previous Issues of Ogg Traffic 1 Status Updates 1.1 Monty Monty did his share for the Vorbis 1.0.1 bugfix release, and he has moved on to more interesting things. He has started work on Vorbis 1.1, which will feature a refined encoder model, not just tuning of existing parameters, and OggFile, among other goodies that will be announced at a later time. Fans of the Garf-tuned Vorbis encoder will be happy to hear that Monty is using Garf's work wherever he can. On the low bitrate side, Monty has some tricks up his sleeve to remedy known problems such as the high frequency boost and the poor performance on problem samples such as "Waiting." 1.2 Jean-Marc Valin Jean-Marc committed tons of changes to Speex leading up to the releases of Speex 1.0.2 and Speex 1.1. More about this below. 1.3 Stan Seibert Besides continuing work on positron, Stan checked in lots of bugfixes to libao and vorbis-tools. Most notably he added FLAC input support for oggenc, which will allow seamless transcoding from FLAC to Vorbis while preserving comments. 1.4 Brendan Cully Brendan fixed a typo in the ices autogen.sh script and corrected the Makefile in vorbis/doc to make building the documentation from outside the source directory work. 1.5 Chris Cheney Chris, master of the Debian packages, has sent in a ton of commits, consisting of version number updates and miscellaneous little bug fixes, in preparation for the Vorbis 1.0.1 release. 1.6 Timothy Terriberry Besides fixing a memory leak in Theora's comment handling and cleaning up the Theora colorspace indicator, Timothy took some time to analyze Mauricio Piacentini's VP3-to-Theora converter and made it work. His work proved two things: Lossless transcoding from VP3 to Theora is possible, but it requires Theora to (internally) change its coordinate system back to VP3's coordinate system. 1.7 Ralph Giles Ralph committed various odd, ends, and code cleanups to Vorbis and Theora, and he updated the MacOS Codewarrior project for Vorbis in anticipation of 1.0.1. 1.8 Jack Moffitt Jack is working on fixing up the Win32 Vorbis SDK, which is the only missing item for the Vorbis 1.0.1 bugfix release. 1.9 Andrew Chatham Andrew committed two patches to the pyvorbis python bindings. One fixes a file descriptor leak, and the other corrects an exception leak. 1.10 Manuel Lora Manuel committed a few corrections to the positron man pages. 2 Recent Developments 2.1 A Technical Introduction to Vorbis If you've ever tried to understand what's going on underneath the hood in Vorbis, but were daunted by reading the source code, this might help a bit. [3]Richard Felton reports that he has written a [4]technical introduction to the Vorbis encode and decode processes. Please note that this is a work in progress, and it's not guaranteed to be correct or complete. Richard would appreciate any feedback and corrections of errors and omissions. 2.2 Speex Releases In relatively short succession, Jean-Marc has cranked out two new releases of his [5]Speex voice codec. Jean-Marc uses Linux-style version numbering where odd numbers denote unstable development releases, and even numbers denote stable production releases. [6]Speex 1.1, the current unstable release, was released on September 19, 2003, and includes many new features such as adaptive gain control and noise removal. Voice-over-IP applications that use libspeex directly will also have access to a jitter buffer and an echo cancellation function. [7]Speex 1.0.2, the most recent stable release, was released on September 24, 2003. This release fixes a few minor bugs, adds soundcard output for Solaris and BSD platforms, and includes a documentation update. 2.3 Xiph.org IRC is moving Ralph Giles [8]announced that the IRC server irc.xiph.org is being shut down, and all support channels that were hosted there have moved to irc.freenode.net. This does not mean that users can't come to IRC for help anymore. The same developers and long-time users are going to be available to answer questions and offer their help. _________________________________________________________________ Ogg Traffic for September 30, 2003 References 1. mailto:carsten@xiph.org 2. vorbis.com/ot 3. xiph.org/archives/vorbis-dev/200309/0020.html 4. geocities.com/gatewaystation/vorbis/vorbis.htm 5. speex.org 6. xiph.org/archives/speex-dev/200309/0030.html 7. xiph.org/archives/speex-dev/200309/0045.html 8. xiph.org/archives/vorbis/200309/0121.html --- >8 ---- List archives: xiph.org/archives Ogg project homepage: 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.