What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall) Options

[rjamorim]

Today I was checking RareWares' links page to find broken links, and happened upon Xiph's page. I noticed the "news" there were 3-4 years old.

So I was wondering, does anyone, by any chance, know what is going on there? Are they working on Vorbis2, or Tarkin, or Theora? Have they disbanded and only the web pages remain? I remember that in Emmett's time, he would feed us news non-stop, mostly from #vorbis (he was a little too loud, matter of factly :B). Now, we listen nothing but crickets.

Do we have some insider here that knows if something is going on there, at all? Maybe Coalson or Valin?

And what the hell is Emmett up to anyway?

Thanks for any info.

R.

[maikmerten]

As already said xiph.org is understaffed - and those people working on xiph.org projects have to make a living with "serious work", too.

Actually I think xiph.org is still functional. It's not a company, it's more group of people trying to provide free multimedia solutions - and they did an do succeed in their mission:

- Vorbis is still a very good audio codec. It's comparing nicely with the most widespread AAC profile (that'd be LC) and outclasses WMA and MP3.

- Theora isn't cutting edge - but it's getting its job done. It's a stable format, perfectly usable now. If you don't want to use MPEG or VC1 in your products you can opt for Theora and together with Vorbis have a complete Audio/Video solution in a free flavor.

- Speex is a very good speech codec. Flexible and powerful. It's even having wide adoption (Valve having it as codec option for in-game communication, Microsoft using it in Xbox Live etc.). It's very nature sorta moves it away from being perceived by end-users - but it's definately making people happy.

- FLAC is doing very nicely. Its compelling featureset made it an accepted storage format for audio archival.


The other Xiph.org projects obviously are "still there", too, but perhaps not really visible to the end user.


As for Theora: Development has been slow, but it recently made important progress. It now has a fully functional decoder (merged from the experimental theora-exp thingie) and the encoder received some work, too. There's nothing better than writing a patch that get's accepted - now the encoder is using some additional flexibility which elevates it a bit from the VP3 codec (which, by the way, had a few bugs here and there that may very well impact on quality and that are fixed in Theora). And despite rumors saying otherwise: I feel Xiph.org *is* very open towards new developers. It took me like 3 days from deciding to work a bit on the encoder, learning C and getting the new encoder stuff into SVN. That may depend on the project, though - thanks to Theora's "alpha" stage (I feel it's doing better than "alpha" suggests, though) it's perhaps more open to new code than e.g. Vorbis, which needs extensive validation for any change.

There obviously are people outside of Xiph.org thinking that Ogg Vorbis/Theora is useful. It seems Opera and Mozilla will use those for the HTML5 <video> element. Open web, open formats, it's just a nice match.

As for Monty: AFAIK he's working for RedHat and is improving the media situation for Linux - he e.g. worked on the USB sound system in the past IIRC. That's for sure important, too, and will make many people happy. This sadly means that there's apparently little time to e.g. review the AoTuV changes.

This post has been edited by maikmerten: Apr 23 2007, 16:03