Will Vorbis 2.0 be backwards compatible? Options

[tsioc]

topic says it all.

[vlada]

I earlier already mentioned, that Ogg formats are not very user-friendly. I give you one example why. Today I downloaded some files from this site. I'll let you know my experiences.

First of all Firefox offered me to open the files with Apollo (my default music player). I had to manually choose a video player (ViPlay, ordinary DirectShow player). It didn't play. So I downloaded the file to my HDD and did some tests.

Firstly I tried to open the Ogg file in some audio players: Apollo, Winamp, XMPlay, foobar2000 - nothing played. I expected at least one player will start playing the audio track. I tried some video players - VLC - worked O.K., MPC - worked, all other DS players failed.

Why? I have installed Illiminable filters, Haali's splitter and FFDShow (Thera and Vorbis allowed). But all DS players will load Illiminable splitter, then connect audio and video to Illiminable DS decoders. For an uknown reason this graph doesen't work, I even tried it in GraphEdit. AviSynth with DirectShowSource failed too.

MPC played file fine, as long as I used internal Ogg spliter and FFDShow decoder. If I disabled FFDShow, MPC wasn't able to connect to Illiminable Theora decoder. The same happend to Illiminable Vorbis decoder if I disabled MPC's and FFDShow's decoders.

I finally found out, that all I need to do is to rename the file to *.ogm. Then Haali's splitter will be used together with FFDShow and it plays almost fine. I say almost, because both FFDShow and VLC used my whole CPU (Athlon XP 1,3 GHz) and the video was still choppy (standard NTSC 640x480, 30fps). MPEG-4 ASP would use about 20% of CPU on my machine.

So my suggestions to developers:

1) Fix Illiminable filters, also make them so, that they can connect to other Ogg splitters and fix the Ogg splitter to allow connection to other decoders (such as FFDShow).

2) I would really suggest to use OGM extension for video files. For most people OGG = Ogg Vorbis and it is an audiofile. I have my audio files associated to a simple audio player (Apollo) and video files to ViPlay. Most people use different players for audio and video IMHO. Matroska uses MKV extension for video and MKA for audio. MP4 allows the same confusion as Ogg, but many people are using M4A for audio-only MP4s.

3) Why don't audio players play Vorbis streams in Ogg file? It works O.K. with Matroska (at least in foobar2000).

4) As I already mentioned a web plugin for OGG would be a really good idea. Something like this DivX plugin.

5) Haali could add support for OGG extension to his filter.