"onion" bitrates, (transcoding from one bitrate to another without really computing anyt Options

[BananaHat]

Hello,

a few years back, I heard (somewhere :-S) of a feature that would theoretically make it possible to encode to Ogg Vorbis in such a way that one could later "transcode" it to a lower bitrate without recoding but instead just taking some chunks. (i.e. originally encode with -q 5 and then do the magic to end up with -q 3 in a very fast and (computationally) inexpensive way)

Does anybody know what this feature is called and it's current status? (Back then, there was just talk that it would be theoretically possible with one certain encoder implementation, but no plans were made to implement it (yet))

Thanks!

P.S: Yes, I searched for it quite extensively, but alas it just won't "click" :-S

[saivert]

Sort of like MP3pro/HE-AAC without the SBR information (you can strip it) then.
or Monkeys Audio hybrid compression mode.