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.

He is longer the "CEO" he is working on other projects nowadays isn't he? Do they still have there monthly IRC meetings? those were always some good indication of what was going on

Actually they made a press release to announce he was departing :B
http://www.xiph.org/press/2003/ceo/

To the best of my knowledge, he worked a while at Neuros, and left soon afterwards. No idea what he's up to these days.



I tried to find IRC logs, to no avail

Well I try to follow the progress in Xiph by the stats of SVN Xiph CIA and the Monthly Meeting.

I found that there is almost null development for Vorbis and Theora...

Tarkin is just vapourware and is not developed anymore... Theora has almost no development (sice alpha7), there is a fully functional decoder in the theora-exp branch but the main library (libtheora) is just incomplete, and over the years mainly a few bugfixes and no quality or improvements.

Vorbis II is just a bunch of ideas and graphs but nothing funcional (vapourware too) or in active development, note that the name of Vorbis II will probably not be used because Monty dont like it, it will be know as "Ghost", so the correct name for Vorbis II is Ghost...

In the mailing list Ralph Giles said that they have not merged aoTuV R1 (or probably b5) to the main libvorbis because they have to check the changes and Monty is the only one that can do that... this is what Ralph said: and because he has not time to do it they have not merged it yet. Is just curious that Monty don't have time to do it when I see a lot of submits from him to SVN for "sushivision"...

In other words there is no future for ogg codecs if their creators don't care about it... they work on it someting like a hobby... probably they don't even know the potential that their codecs have in the world... is a shame...

But WTF is he wasting his time on, I wonder? :-B



Shit. Somebody should just go ahead, fork everything and start a new project, bringing along people like aoyumi, Blacksword, QuantumKnot...

yep, totally

Monty is a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF) to quote an IT term. But seriously, it's true. If only Monty can do what the audio community would like, then that's a bad thing. Maybe it's time to move on...

This should have happened 2 years ago already - its long overdue.

I've been working on a few different things in a few different areas, but for the most part I've been writing new things and managing things here at Sonivius, which is my production company here in Philadelphia. It's nice to know that people still care. :)

As far as what Xiph is doing, I've got no idea -- I'm out of the scene as anything but a content producer.

It seems as though people are kinda pissed off about how it seems that nothing is happening over there. I can't really blame them, but I would caution against making too many assumptions. They could be hard at work on something new and interesting -- I suspect that someone 'in the know' will drop in soon enough and give a full download.

I've been thinking about the current situation of free-and-open tools for multimedia production a lot (I work with this stuff every day), and I can't help but think that it might be time to open up a research and development lab here at Sonivius to make things work a little better.

One of the things that kinda bugs me is that there's a lot of good stuff out there, but it's locked up in libraries and applications that are a pain in the ass to find, dependencies to manage... From a production standpoint, it's very annoying. What version are we using? Is there some guy halfway across the world with a better version that we should be using, and do we have to be subscribed to an arcane mailing list to know about it? Do we really need to set up a Linux box with a solid dev environment and compile things just to encode some video?

These kinds of questions are easy to answer for the kind of people that hang out on HA and check IRC and subscribe to mailing lists. I'm a producer that has that kind of connection, but I don't know anyone else like me that wants to take this kind of time to get work done. The last-mile of free and open multimedia solutions kinda sucks. Actually, it doesn't kinda suck, it sucks a lot.

Maybe it's time for me to get back in the game.

Emmett Plant
Sonivius, Inc.

Sweet

Planning anything yet?

I've got some ideas, and it seems that the folks on the Sonivius board are pretty enthusiastic about them. Maybe folks here would like to kick up some dust, as well? Lemme know, folks.

Do you remember this thread?

I don't, I wasn't around for it. It looks like it starts out with the same kind of thing I keep hearing (Xiph is doing nothing), but ends with a reality (Xiph isn't working on the precise thing you want them to work on). Maybe they're doing great stuff and they're just not really talking about it -- This isn't really a new condition at Xiph. It is the way things are, and the way things have been for a while.

Like I said, I'm a lot more interested in the last mile. I'm interested in working on the toolchain that gets us away from things like DirectShow filters and specific versions of specific applications using specific libraries on specific platforms. It's just not helpful. When I say, 'I want to play this file,' I need to have an answer like, 'You want Application X, you can get it at Website X, and there are copies there for Windows, OS X and Linux.'

I also desperately want that answer to be correct and for the person asking the question to be satisfied with the output of the application. You can't please everyone all the time, but if you have decent last-mile solutions that don't require people to actually know what muxing is, what DirectShow filters are and the difference between something called 'speex' and something called 'granulepos,' these tiny issues from the software-authoring stages of the game become less relevant.

I'll say this again, because I want this to be crystal-clear -- I'm not really interested in getting into a pissing contest with Xiph over your favorite potential feature being implemented in their official releases. I'm a lot more interested in bringing this technology to a place where it's easy for people to author and distribute content with these open and free technologies, and a place where it's easy for people to obtain and view this content.

There's a point at which you have to work with the best of what's there, and not get heavily involved in what I would consider to be codebase minutiae. At the end of the day, it affects me as a producer to the tune of 'nothing,' and to people that view my product to the tune of 'nothing.' It is a binary switch -- It either works or it doesn't, and I'm interested in making it work.

The demands of my company and other companies I work with are not the same demands of most codehackers and specification-junkies. We need authoring tools that work 100% of the time with a minimum investment of time and energy. We cannot be reasonably expected to compile things or hunt for stuff on rarewares for hours, hoping we've got the right lib.

I hope this at least puts some things in perspective in terms of the kind of things I want to work on, and I'm hoping to find a couple of devs interested in helping me out. The last mile is more important than you probably think, and there's a great big world out there of people to whom only the last mile is important.

Emmett

You know, even if Xiph has slipped into coma OGG oddly enough still seems to be vital and progressing in a very odd way. This seems to be for two reasons. First reason is because of Autovo, who has managed to evolve the codec into something very interesting. Some people seem to think that his changes are really more minor tuning than a technical "revolution." Other people seem to think just the opposite. I don't care about people's opinion of what Autovo has done. I just know that the last version sounds great! When I play back q8.5 recordings on my audio U3 I can hear things like the natural tones of the instruments of great jazz players such as Charlie Mingus or Winston Marsillas. It sure as hell kicks MP3's ass and I honestly can't say if 320kbs AAC is better. No bad for a free lossy codec.

The other reason is the growing MP3 licensing meltdown. Thompson's has raised their licensing fees to unreasonable levels for a pretty crappy codec, MP3. Add to that the recent judgment against Microsoft for 1.6 billion dollars won by lucent. So on top of paying through the nose for licensing crappy mp3 technology, you might still have to pay even more to lucent!!!! Not to mention the possibility that lucent might have a legal claim on YOUR future earnings even though you thought that you legally licensed mp3!!

This IS the sort of environment that can make a content producers find out if the rumors about some guy half way across the planet does have a better way of doing things.

The problem with having aoTuV is that it's not official. A bunch of people don't even KNOW it exists. If it was the official Vorbis, then it'd be getting a lot more usage and Vorbis would look a lot better.

Tremor, on the other hand, uses a ton of memory (code + tables + buffer). I'd still like for memory reduction to be lowered. And maybe CPU usage. It's completely dead. Hasn't seen an actual, code-related commit in years.

I really wish Xiph would be active. I also wished they'd improve the Vorbis situation so it gets even more hardware support. Hell, Rockbox has made some improvements to Tremor, but you don't see that being merged back into the main trunk. It's a shame.

I thought Ghost was Speex II, with the Vorbis I psymodel.

It's good to see that you're enthousiastic about the developments, but I have to call TOS#8 here - if you make a statement like this, you need proof (ie, ABX test results).

The problem I see with that thread is that it got derailed after it was claimed that all Xiph projects are dead, jmvalin didn't like that statement and the original focus was lost.

I agree not all Xiph projects are dead, but that's mostly thanks to individual developers than Xiph itself - that is, the projects would still be alive even if Xiph didn't exist. Valin keeps Speex alive, Coalson keeps FLAC alive, and even aoyumi and Blacksword keep vorbis somewhat alive.

The issue is not Xiph's projects being dead, it is Xiph itself looking dead.

Well it was me, ho stated that the projects are dead, which was to hard. But most project haven't announced any news since then.

I absolutely agree with Emmett regarding the last mile. There are great things available in the sources at Xiph.org, but unusable for most people. The only exception is the Ogg Vorbis format. There are many great tools to create, tag and play it. But I don't know any tool to work with Ogg files, like we have YAMB/MP4Box for MP4 and MKVToolnix for Matroska files. If I wanted to create a Ogg Theora/Vorbis file, I have no idea how to do it without using command line.

At least the playback issues I mentioned before are gone with latest Haali's splitter and ffdshow. Also if anyone wants a just-working solution to play Ogg Theora files, there is the VLC player which is available for almost all platforms. These are good news, but I think to spread the format a web plugin is needed. But I see some development in this directin, which is a good news. There is a working sample in Java.

A YouTube like server based on Ogg Theora/Vorbis would be really nice

I made experience with that last-mile thing issue recently. I wanted to cut a movie (OGM container, vorbis audiostream, xvid video) into parts and then rearrange those and rejoin them. And i wanted to do that in a simple GUI app without reencoding. The only app on win32 which was supposed to do that was VirtualDubMod - but the current version would instant-crash on my coreDuo. After reading lots of messageboards, websearching and various trial and error, i found out that a 2 year older release of VirtualDubMod would not crash and do what i want. I doubt that any "normal" user would want to go through so much hassle - he or she would simply come to the conclusion "OGM sucks!".

And this was just about a container.

- Lyx

Ghost is somewhat being designed by Christopher Montgomery (Vorbis) and Jean-Marc Valin (Speex), the problem is that Valin wants that Ghost take another direction that Monty wants, but no, Speex II is not Speex with Vorbis I psymodel... AFAIK Speex 1.2 will have the vorbis psymodel.

Maybe Valin can help to clear the things about Ghost?

The most active Xiph project nowdays seems to be Theora...

BTW, there are some interesting ideas for the next SoC

Of which development has been nonexistant for some (long?) time...

Log from Monthly Meeting in february


..which most are from last year's SOC. And some of those are last years active projects which had developers who somehow disappeared... (at least one did because of unfortunate accident, don't know/remember about others).

Btw, here is preliminary ideas and discussion about Ghost:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Ghost

There is one (count 'em) item on the SoC that could be considered 'last-mile,' and it's 'audio encoders in QuickTime/CoreAudio.' That's all. The other thing that maybe comes close is Theora implementation in a piece of chat software for Gnome, which borders on the incredibly unexciting as the installed base of this particular application is likely a rounding error compared to the installed base of popular alternatives.

Yes, there's interesting stuff there, but the vast majority of it doesn't overlap with the kind of thing I want to get done.

Emmett

With all due respect to Vorbis, Theora, etc. Xiph is in bad shape. I'm glad to hear that people are still developing Vorbis on their own and are keeping the codec in active development (sort of). As for Xiph all I can say is "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

OGM DOES suck. It's a very hacky container.

The last thing Ogg Vorbis needs now is Ogg Vorbis II, it would fragment its already small market share.

>they work on it someting like a hobby... probably they don't even
> know the potential that their codecs have in the world... is a shame...

You would expect more enthusiasm if it was a hobby, atleast someone would spend a Saturday afternoon on it.

To sum up Ogg Vorbis, it is a ship without a captain, with engine trouble, there are a few people in the boiler room auToV, Blacksword, etc hammering away to keep the engines turning, but with no one up on the bridge, that ship is not going anywhere.

Unfortunately I must say I agree. It's sad, I have more than half of my music collection in Ogg Vorbis and I fear within the next few years hardware support will become worse than it is today and Vorbis will be obsolete because there is no work put into it. Sure, tuning projects like aoTuV and Lancer has kept Vorbis alive for the last couple of years, but how long will they have time to put into it? I just wish there would be more talented people who could contribute...

/Kef

As a successor/alternative to mp3, Vorbis has been overtaken in a remarkably short period of time by AAC, not in the least because of AAC's cheap and flexible licensing model (much better than mp3, for example).

I feel that on the whole, the audio world should be very thankful to Xiph even if Vorbis should die as an actively developed, mainstream format: by just being there, as good as it is, the project has put pressure on the competition (mainly AAC, and to a lesser extent, WMA) to keep their licensing costs low enough to prevent users (i.e., application and hardware developers) from choosing Vorbis as the 'post-mp3' codec. In the end, this means cheaper products for everyone (a free iTunes/WMP/Winamp wouldn't have been possible under an MPEG-2-type license!)

The $25.000 cap on AAC decoding license fees, for example, is a flippin' bargain for any decent-size hardware or software developer. Even Vorbis can't match that as any big company using it would want to do at least some legal due diligence (with the Vorbis no-patents claim), and your average lawyer wouldn't even step out of bed for a fee like that.

Yea, all this doom and gloom about Vorbis is disconcerting to see. Living in the here and now, tests have shown you can't get any better for at least the 80 to 128 kbps range. Since Vorbis is an open format, 3rd party support should never wane, so Rockbox will at least ensure its availability on DAPs in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the hardware support that is available now. Yes, it would be nice if there was more direction from a leader in order to steer this marvel of a format into the future but hobbyist fascinations come and go. Live and let live! If someone steps into a leadership position at Xiph.org and incorporates the latest tunings at least, more power to them.

Well, yes, but let me clarify my original post by slight rewording: "In my opinion I honestly can't say if 320kbs AAC is better ..." I did use the personal pronoun "I" in the original post. Now if I had used the third person impersonal "it" in the original post (ex: "It is clear that 320kbs..." or "It has been shown that 320kbs...") you would be correct.

Yes, Xiph is in bad shape, but ogg is far from waning. Hardware support for ogg is not currently wanning at all. I went shopping for a PAP in dec 2006 and I had a surprising choice for PAPs that supported ogg. Most of the models were new to the market. Toshiba, Samsung, Iriver, iAudio etc... Just no options from from the "big 3", Zune, Creative and IPOD.

I don't thing a Vorbis II would fracture the market because there seems to be a such a strong desire for producers of content to find anything but MP3. By producers of content I mean artists(they also don't like middle men taking large chunks out of their revenue), producers, software producers(everyone from decoder writers to media players for PCs creators, etc...) and distributors(mainly online down loadable content shops like Itunes music store etc...).

I understand the point that technically ogg is not zero legal fee cost for a software producer who may want to use it. But the point is probably exaggerated. By the same token, if you think you should pay a lawyer to cover your rear because Ogg's patent may or may not be completely solid, then the same is true for AAC. How can you be sure that the AAC patent is completely solid and the 25$ licensing fee will be the only licensing fee you will be legally obligated to pay? Recent events in litigation have shown that you may not be able to assume that about any claim on any codec!

That's how percieve it is. Open source projects really never die they just slow down to a sluggish halt until they are ressurected by somebody who wants to continue to put the developement time and effort into them. The drawback is that sometimes it takes years. I don't really see Ghost as being anything more then experimental branch in the CVS due to the fact that it would probably be impossible to make it backwards compatible with any of the current source code that's out there.

I was impressed that they did publish a research paper regarding Speex 1.2 for AES though:

http://people.xiph.org/~jm/papers/aes120_speex_vorbis.pdf

He is correct anyways, because to put it simply: "opinions" about soundquality aren't allowed on this board. If someone makes a claim, he HAS to prove it. It is not an option, but a requirement.

To be upfront here: i doubt that you can ABX q3.0 from your stated q8.5 and are just praising your imagination here.

Hi! I just wanted to say there's currently some noise in the vorbis-dev mailing list. Mostly about multichannel coupling and a possible Ambisonics extension to the "standard". I tried to contribute to the discussion by explaining what the specification allows in terms of joint channel coding and by talking about solutions within the spec that seemed most practicable to me.

But we all know that's not enough for something to happen.


I'd like to pose this counter question:
What could Xiph do with its limited resources?


Cheers!
SG

Get someone besides Monty to merge aoyumi's work with the trunk. And find a way to spark more interest in Vorbis, especially by programmers and hardware manufacturers, to get some improvements in it and more support.

That would give vorbis a HUGE boost in usefulness. At q0 with 6ch it ends up at around ~250kbps, that just can't compete with he-aac smashing 6ch into ~100kbps (q-2 only gets it down to ~160kbps).

If point stereo is any indication (phase stereo isn't even in current vorbis is it?)
q0
1ch 56kbps
2ch 64kbps
in theory, perhaps
3ch 80kbps
4ch 96kbps
5ch 112kbps
6ch 128kbps <- a much more reasonable number

Why arbitray channel coupling wasn't built into vorbis in the first place, I'll never understand.

Multichannel coupling for vorbis is the boost that Ogg needs right now, not so much a fully developed video codec (although I wish tarkin was more real).

Nothing new there. Monty has been talking about Ambisonics since 2003.

The news page is on the wiki:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Current_events

Let's just say we're hoping to kill two birds with one stone here. It's *way* to early to say how this thing turns out or whether it'll work at all. And yes, Ghost is very different from both Speex and Vorbis.



Not dead, but understaffed. There's simply not enough man-hour for the things we're trying to do. Of course, the place where it shows the most is the website because we've always had problems keeping webmasters around and it's sort of the last thing we care about when strapped for time. Hell, I don't even know how to make non-trivial changes to the Speex site

Put the other way, Xiph.Org is no more, no less than the sum of all its contributors, plus a bit of infrastructure.

I see that Xiph is mentoring projects for this year's Google Summer of Code. One of the proposed projects is basically to be Monty's assistant in Ghost development. There are also several Speex-related project ideas. To me, this suggests that development at Xiph is still going strong, but like Jean-Marc said, needs more man-power.

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Summer_of_Code

Hi to all,
i was just searching for information about multichannel encoding in OGG and i founded this thread.
Among these great audio developer minds, i would say that i'm with who that push for a reprise of the OGG development, so i really hope something will move on.
And i can say that for me too OGG sounds REALLY great

I wish Monty would be like Josh for FLAC. The latter develops and markets his little baby, while Monty cannot finish anything. He just starts everything, but cannot see it through. He cannot even bother to encourage the integration of Aoyumi-s work into Vorbis. No nurturing of some these volunteers. Nothing. I am an Vorbis user and it will stay that way because the alternatives are still not good enough for me (several reasons), but should I need some other codecs in the future I will try to avoid everything Monty is involved in.

Triza

If you benefit from the development of open source software, enjoy it. Make suggestions. Turn your friends on to it. Use it at work.

If you aren't directly helping with the development of open source software, then please don't criticize those who are. Whatever Xiph needs right now to move forward, I'm pretty sure it isn't value judgements.

Sounds a lot like me.
Once I figure out how something can be done, actually doing it seems to become boring. I didn't follow developments at Xiph too closely, so what I'm saying is based mostly on what's written above in this thread, but maybe it'd be a good idea to let Monty go on inventing new stuff and then move on, and have someone else finish up after him. On this line of thinking, the Summer of Code project mentioned above could bring some interesting developments.

Why the heck is anyone complaining?

Trust me when I say potential vorbis users do not care about how xiph.org looks. No average joe will ever use vorbis... they don't use aac either except when it's from itunes. Those who have any interest in encoding to vorbis, are not average joes... they don't depend on any fancy homepage... you might know of this encoder called lame... notice any fancy official homepage (with binaries) for it? No, thought so. Noobs encode by pressing the rip button in their program suite. And they would sort of be pissed off if those sort of programs defaulted to "ogg vorbis" Average users don't have any interest in vorbis, even if you tell them what it is.

Those who actually care hunt down lame, or vorbis if they care, and the recommended versions and settings.

Vorbis is still in development, and has been for a long time. Who cares if it's not monty anymore? Much respect to him but he's moved on and other capable people are now tweaking it. That happens all the time in the open source community and is the beauty of the concept. The linux world is growing, and vorbis with it. It has a decent amount of hardware support, which is actually incredible if you think about it. Many (most?) people here on HA use it. Many games use it. It is used by some anime encoders. It's a success story and it's not going anywhere soon. But yes, it will never be able to compete with AAC no matter how good it is. It caters to a niche and anyone who thought it would turn out differently would've been incredibly naive.

I am a freedom geek, so vorbis is an excellent product to me. It's top of the league in quality (for mono and stereo only, at this point admittedly) and it gives me a feelgood feeling philosophically.

Anyway I don't feel I have much to lose with vorbis. I use it for all my audio. If worst comes to worse and it dies in 5 years time, I can simply convert it to lossless without losing anymore quality. At that time I expect disk space will be a lot cheaper (100 gb bluray discs or something perhaps? ). Simple as that.

Why, thank-you! (I created the LAME homepage, and for you ignorant fools, I explain: I did a minimalist design on the developers' request)

And binaries are not available because of patents, not because the lame devs are as lazy as Xiph developers. For all that it's worth, you can find sites hosting binaries at the links page.

I have used Vorbis, but I'd rather not on the whole. But I can't say it would bother me that much if an encoding program "defaulted to" it. I'd just change the setting.

I think this is one of the major problems. There are some people (just average users) who read about Ogg Vorbis, they heard it sounds better then MP3 and they want to try it. So they get to the official webpage and they hope to get an official tool to convert their CDs to Ogg Vorbis. But what do they find? An outdated CLI encoder and obviously they have no idea how to use it. Then there are links to many programs and they have no idea which one to choose.

Many people need to be told what to do. Use program X to create, tag and play the Ogg Vorbis files. This is all what they need. They are confused if there are more choices.

Ogg Vorbis format has all the advantages you can imagine. So why only a few people (including me) use it? Wrong marketing and missing easy to use tools and guides. All the development is not concentrated in one places and there are no good informations for end users. If you want to be successful, you have to concentrate on end users.

Look at Firefox - if you download it and install, it is as simple as possible. No need to set up anything, just use it. If you need more functions, then you are probably an advanced user, who knows how to install the proper extension. Opera has too many functions in default install and so it confuses users. And the market share shows you clearly, what most users want - a save browser which is just working.

Another example is the Matroska project: you have an official MKVToolnix program from Moritz Bunkus, which will convert almost anything to Matroska format. Then you have an official DirectShow splitter from Haali which will enable playback in all DS players. There are also libraries for developers, so they can add matroska support to their applications. The result: Matroska is becoming more and more popular, although it has very hard competition in AVI, MP4 and TS.

An interesting bottom line is, that Matroska gains it's popularity also because of Vorbis. It is the only container (except of the dead OGM format), which can store Vorbis sound and MPEG-4 video.

I think it is doing extremely well for something that is not backed by 'the industry' and has little/no official marketing/promotion (at least I don't see any).

Still.. ~250kbps for 6ch audio (q0) still isn't too bad... considering I won't use any less than 256kbps mp2/ac3 for 2ch dvd audio.

Discussion about the Rarewares redesign moved to this thread.

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.