Hi, as again work commitments have kept be busy most of this year, I haven't had time to test a release.

There were lots of accumulated fixes in svn which I have not had the time to fully test. I have decided to finally get around to splitting the releases to stable and unstable. 0.72.1838 is the first unstable release. Hopefully this will let me have more frequent releases, without having to worry about breaking stuff for average users.

0.71.0946 is still the recommended release for first time users, or those who don't want to live on the edge. There will likely be a couple more unstable releases before the next stable release. It's not that I know this release to be unstable... it just has lots of new code which hasn't been properly tested yet, though it does have a lot of bugfixes.

I am not planning to take any more contracts for 6-8 weeks and I will be working primarily on oggcodecs for that time. So now would be a good time to make any outstanding and unresolved issues known to me. If you have in the past and they still aren't fixed, remind me again.

Current priorities are : Better encoding support, vista support, tagging, shell integration, Windows Mobile 5.0 support.

For the full list of changes in this release and other information you can see this page

In the medium term, hopefully I will finally get a new website that doesn't suck so bad

Zen.

i have a tiny question about your FLAC decoder that you have. right now, i have it installed and when i try to play .flac files with Media Player Classic, it doesn't work. so are your DS filters made for container formats such as .mkv?

edit: reason i'm asking is because i'm looking for a DS FLAC Decoder. right now, i'm using CoreFLAC but that looks like it has been abandoned(meaning the song ending bug can't be fixed). so i'm just looking for a replacement to CoreFLAC

Can you tell me whether .flac files work in windows media player? This will help me figure out where the problem is... ie. if it's in directshow or a compatability problem with MPC.

And when you say "doesnt' work" is there an error message or anything?

And as to mkv, currently these codecs only work for native .flac files or ogg flac files. They currently won't work at all with mkv files.

Media Player Classic says "Failed to Render the File"

WMP gave me a popup and the Help button directed me to this website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme...amp;id=C00D1199

Sounds like it possibly didn't install at all. What file extension is this file?

Have you tried with a simple ogg file? One from here http://www.vorbis.com/music/

Did you install as administrator? Easiest way to see what is being loaded is graphedit, and post an image of the graph... it should look like this if it is a .flac file




The most common causes of this error are.

1) Some other random codec pack overrode parts of the install
2) You are playing an OGM file not an OGG file
3) You have a file with the wrong file extension. ie. an Ogg Flac File which is .flac instead of .ogg, or a native flac file which is .ogg instead of .flac
4) Install didn't complete. You had a directshow player open during install (try a reboot). Or you weren't administrator and the registry entries couldn't be set.
5) Trying to just regsvr32 to switch filters in and out. This includes most "codec manager" programs.

Thanks for the new release.

Are you aware of any issues with Winamp? I never got it to work with it, always had to use the Ogg Vorbis CODEC for MSACM 0.0.3.6 or ffdshow.

the file extension is .flac

i can already play .ogg files with CoreVorbis(MPC's internal one is buggy and produces horrible sound so i disabled it).

yes, i installed it as an Administrator. in fact, there is only one account on this computer.

as for GraphEdit, i'll find a download link and i'll post the results.

2: i'm playing a .flac file which was made by flac.exe . it didn't have the --oggflac switch so i know that it's not Ogg FLAC. also, foobar2000 plays it with absolutely no problems.
4: the install completed according to what i saw.
5: after installing oggcodecs, i didn't even touch any of the files installed. i only unregistered CoreFLAC so that i could try playing the .flac file with the oggcodecs.

edit: tried using GraphEdit and it didn't work. it didn't do anything with the .flac file. it just gave me a messagebox saying that it can't parse it. i also tried using regsvr32 to re-register the FLAC filters and no luck either.

Sounds like par tof the problem is that you have two sets of conflicting codecs installed. If you say your files are playing with CoreVorbis then they must be using a different splitter/source (possibly Haali?) but definately not mine. If CoreVorbis is being used to play .ogg files, then that means either my codecs didn't install, or something as subsequently overriden their settings.

If you installed my codecs then unregistered CoreFLAC, it would have cleared out the associations for the .flac extension, now leaving you with two sets of codecs installed and neither of them properly associated.



I have not tried to use WinAMP for a while... i will install and get back to you. AFAIK there is a setting somewhere that you can tell it to play certain file types with directshow instead of it's own inbuilt codecs.

hmmm. i just tried unregistering CoreFLAC and CoreVorbis and it WORKED. i don't know what was wrong but at least it's fixed. now just to get rid of CoreFLAC. although i will miss CoreFLAC's ability to show the song info .

edit: i think i found a bug with the FLAC handling. it might have been already mentioned but, MPC has auto-repeat on which means it will repeat the song countless times after it finishes. but when it does that, i can't hear any sound

Good to hear it is working now.

re: the song info... check out a project on sourceforge called wmptagext (windows media player tag extender) it should make the metadata show in windows media player... if this is RE: another player... MPC perhaps? Let me know and i'll have a look at what i need to do to make it appear there too. Pretty soon the functionality of WMPTagExt will be included in a release.

As to the repeating bug. That's an unfortunate known issue. I'm looking into that at the moment. I think it happened when i updated FLAC... i think i had a little tweak in libFLAC that i overwrote.

Thank you, the problem I have with Vorbis audio muxed with video into a Matroska container, I also use Haali's Media Splitter, but it doesn't work with Gabest's either.

Unless everything has changed from the previous version, the decoders in this package only work with the parser filter in this package. They will not work with any other parser filters (mkv, ogm, avi, mp4, etc.)

Couple of questions..
1. Vorbis encoder: can the encoding quality be adjusted yet?
2. Can the mux filter be used to mux an existing theora encode and an existing vorbis encode together yet?
(ie. send ogg packets from the parser directly to the mux filter?)

Yes, as you say, these don't work with any other splitter. As i've said before... these filters have taken a while to mature, and not having anything depend on their behaviour makes it easy to move forward without having to worry about lots of backwards compatability. There's still some more maturing to do... but when it gets closer to 1.0 i will start looking at providing a compatability mode to the other splitters. Of course any of those splitters could be changed fairly easily so they could use the decoders.

As to 1 and 2. These are still not implemented. I'm currently doing a couple more small bugfixes. Those two fixes are related. The incompatibility came about when i changed all the decode side infrastructure. Similar work on the encode side will be happening soon and will make them both compatible again, at the same time the encode options will be exposed.

They are two of the highest priority items at the moment. They are part of the list of things to be included before 0.80.

I was playing around with icecast2 and a vorbis stream on my own pc. Playback works in WMP.. untill the metadata changes (track change), then the audio stops and the CPU goes into a fit (100% usage). Same for both the stable and unstable release.

I don't really care about the meta data being displayed. But untill this problem is fixed, I can't tell people they can install this to get vorbis streaming support in WMP

This flac bug is fixed in svn. 0.73 is not too far away, it also has a lot of other fixes and improvements.

The icecast/chaining thing is a big problem. It will be fixed eventually. This is one of those areas of the spec that is extremely difficult to implement generically and correctly, especially when you are working within an existing media framework like directshow.

Excellent! i can't wait to try out the new FLAC filter.

OK... another unstable release is out 0.73.1936

http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/downloads.html#unstable

As before, most people should continue with 0.71 as that release has been reasonably well tested. Unless you are affected by a specific bug, or want to try a new feature.

The changes from 0.72 to 0.73 are:

# Encode options for theora, vorbis, speex and flac and property pages in graphedit
# Improved OGM decoding
# Improved subtitle support
# Vorbis channel order fixed
# 24/32 bit >2 channel decode support improved for vorbis and flac
# Fix end of file/repeat bug in flac
# Correct handling of aspect ratio in theora
# "Add to playlist" option for WMP appears in explorer right-click menu

Mainly, aside from fixing the FLAC bug that got re-introduced in 0.71, and fixing the aspect ratio handling in theora and channel order in vorbis. The major changes are in the encoders. All the codecs now expose encoding options, and have a property page in graphedit. These have only had very limited testing, it's probably possible to crash it if you try hard enough. But other than that, you can set various settings in FLAC, vorbis, speex and theora now.

For all of the encoders, you have to set the options after the input pin is connected. (If you don't, there currently isn't a lot of error checking, but strange things will probably happen). Also the theora encoder has a quirk. You have to set it's options after the input pin is connected, but before the output pin is connected. The other encoders can be done before or after the output pin is connected. That will be fixed soon.

Next to be fixed is the output pin interfaces on the encoders, so they can chain back into their decoders, and some improvements to the muxer.


Zen.

the FLAC bug still isn't fixed

edit: i'm also wondering about the MSLUR80.dll and MSLUP80.dll files which are included. what are they and why do i need them(getting rid of them makes the codecs not work).

The flac bug isn't fixed? Damn... it was happening in WMP, and i fixed it there. I assumed the same would apply to MPC... i guess i need to get MPC and try. Sorry about that. The cause of that bug was actually in libFLAC (well, it's not so much a bug as an inconsistency)... i had a patched version of 1.1.1, and when i updated to 1.1.2 i forgot to patch it.

MSLUR80.dll etc. are custom C runtimes i built against unicows (unicode emulation for win 9X/ME)... they are similar to MSVCRT80.dll (the default runtime). I basically built my own patched version of these runtimes to include unicode emulation.

I don't know if you remember but in 0.69 and earlier, there were problems with paths that contained unicode characters... which is not such a big deal if you only speak english... but its not very cool if your computer is setup in a language that uses extended characters, ie any cyrillic, and most asian langauges.

The root of the issue is that 95/98/ME don't support the unicode versions of the win32 API. What this means some people do is they have to build two different versions of their software. One that uses unicode for modern windows, and one that doesn't for older windows. If you do any programming, this is the reason for all the TCHAR 's and the windows API functions which end in either A or W to differentiate the unicode and non-unicode versions.

This can be a reasonable approach if you don't mind shipping two different versions of your software, and you don't mind having places all through your code where in the unicode version, one bit of code is used, and in the other version, the non-unicode version is used. It's a major maintenance problem. A lot of the TCHAR, win32 api macros avoid the need for a lot of this, but in places where you have to interface onto other software which requires 16 bit unicode, or requires UTF8, it starts to cause a problem.

In general if you don't consistently use unicode everywhere, its much harder to test, and much easier to make little mistakes that only affect one or the other.

There's really three choices...

a) Ship a unicode and non-unicode version
b) Stop support for 9X/ME
c) Use an emulation layer, so that it adds unicode support to 9X/ME

Both a and b are a problem. As much as i'd be happy to not support 9X/ME anymore, other software uses and distributes oggcodecs, and it would potentially mean that i would be forcing them to also ship their product in two versions, or not support 9X/ME. And there are at least a couple of people left out there who do use 98 or ME.

I may find a better compromise in the future, but for now this seems to be the most robust solution.

(Sorry, that was a long explanation!)

meh it's file. the only thing that matter is if it's understandable or not

as for the FLAC support, FLAC 1.1.3 is coming soon

and on another note, i just installed and uninstalled CoreFLAC(i tried to use it as a splitter and use ffdshow as a decoder for it but that didnt work) and the end result was your filters not working. i'll have to yet again search and remove stuff from the registry

Hi, I installed thoggen the other day and was more-or-less pleased with the results. I also installed oggcodecs UNSTABLE yesterday because the stable branch gave me a slightly-incorrect aspect ratio. The new version handles the aspect ratio correctly, and I'm happy.

But there's one thing; I get black bars at the top and bottom of the screen in mplayer2.exe. Do you see this too?

Current UNSTABLE Version (0.80.15039) - 14/06/2008

Changes this version

* Support for Microsoft Windows Vista
* Updated compiler to Visual Studio 2008 Express, which drops support for Windows 9x, NT 4.
* Updated libspeex to version 1.2 beta 1
* Updated libvorbis to version 1.2.1 (20080501)
* Updated libogg to version 1.1.3
* Updated libtheora to version 1.0beta3 (20080416)
* Updated libFLAC to version 1.2.1
* Fixed crash at the end of incomplete Theora files.

Cheers,
Cristian.