Looking through John33's Vorbis compiles, I noticed that recently a lot of new/improved oggenc versions appeared (all compiled using libvorbis1.0) and that alone from his site the user has the choice from 5 versions of oggenc, not counting the P4 optimized and GCC3.2 compiled versions. If you add the original Vorbis.com vorbis-tools-1.0 package to that and Garf's recent GT3b1 (using oggenc2.2 and his tuned libvorbis), you end up with 7 (!) different versions of oggenc, which could be quite confusing to a newbie.

Luckily most of these versions produce quality-identical results, but I still think this chaos should be cleaned up by either centralizing oggenc development or creating a Recommended Compiles / Settings thread.

dev0

or just creating a new section on the rarewares site named experimental or optimized compiles.

They could all pretty much be merged up into one SUPERoggenc!!( )

How do you guys want to see it?

They could, but the methods of integrating e.g. FLAC support are quite different (from how I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong) between oggencFLAC and oggenc2.x.

But instead of just merging them all into a uberoggenc, merging the improvements into two different versions would IMO be more sensible:

1. oggenc - oggenc supporting uncompressed input for use with CD Rippers etc., fixed things like unicode support, tagging (I sent you a PM about that a while back)...

2. oggencxp - imroved oggenc for the experienced user, including functions like transcoding from lossless formats (either using libs or bins), enhanced tagging support etc.

dev0

Haha. Sounds good to me. I am always willing try a new complie of something.

If you ask me, such a thread is needed, of course.


As I read here, it seems even more confusing than compared to the old Lame days...





Well, why I visit this Ogg forum:

I use Ogg for movie audio streams, mostly going for low bitrates between 64 and 128 kbit/s.

I use the vorbis.dll included in HeadAC3he 0.23a, that is from 20th July 2002.



1. Is this dll still good, or are there big improvements ?

Welll, if so, perhaps, you could point Dark_Avenger in this direction for an update...



2. Actually, I want to go for High-Quality sound stream in a movie, bitrate between 128 and 160 kbit/s.

So, I encoded by HeadAC3he, Ogg vbr --quality 5.00

(Interestingly, there is a huge bump in theoretical bitrate, shown there, q4.99 has 126 kbit/s, q5.0 = 160 kbit/s,
the result with my audio was averaged 147 kbit/s. )

What is happening at q5.0 ?
With that version lossless channel coupling ?



How do you rate q5 with that OggVorbis from 20th July 2002 ?

comparable to mp3 lame --alt-preset standard ?
or better ?




3. saving stereo information, surround information for DPL, or DPL2/Logic7:
better q5, or q6 ?

Well, I even expereinced in past, that lower q values, resulting in averaged bitrates about 60 - 75 kbit/s, kept surround somehow, not bad for movies.

After tying to decide myself today which version to use, I decided that such a thread is really needed.

But what is the recommended compile at the moment?

John33's (vorgin/FLAC/unicode/2.1) oggenc using the post-1.0 CVS code?
or
Garf's tuned GT3 beta1 (Is he still working on it? Does the CVS include his fixes?)

Some quick thoughts on quality settings:
-q 6: Lossless stereo coupling used all the time; doesn't scale well above this value; should be transparent (~192kbps)
-q 5: Ment to be transparent (~160kbps)
-q 4: ??? sounds good for its bitrate (~128kbps)
...
-q 0: Lowest tuned quality level (-1 is not considered tuned AFAIK), Vorbis Showcase bitrate (~64kbps)

Are there any other commandlines/setting, which are commonly used or serve a specific purpose (Audiobooks, Ultra-Low-Bitrate etc.)?

I'd be willing to create/maintain the Recommended Vorbis Settings and Compiles Thread, if there really is interest in such a thing.

dev0

That is not true: I read somewhere that lossless stereo coupling sometimes is not used at q7.

And I can still hear artifacts (preecho in castanets.flac or hihat.flac) at -q5 in the 1.0 libs. I recommend -q6 with standard 1.0 libs or -q5 with gt3b1.