Hi everybody:
Here is the newest round of status updates from Xiph.org. The HTML
version is at http://www.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. http://www.vorbis.com/ot/
3. http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis-dev/200309/0020.html
4. http://www.geocities.com/gatewaystation/vorbis/vorbis.htm
5. http://www.speex.org/
6. http://www.xiph.org/archives/speex-dev/200309/0030.html
7. http://www.xiph.org/archives/speex-dev/200309/0045.html
8. http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis/200309/0121.html
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