Release: liboggz 0.9.8

liboggz 0.9.8 includes the first release of oggz-chop, as well as support for the new karaoke codec OggKate.

oggz-chop can be used to serve time ranges of Ogg media over HTTP by any web server that supports CGI. The oggz-chop binary simply checks if it is being run as a CGI script by checking some environment variables, and if so acts based on the CGI query parameter t=, much like mod_annodex. It accepts all the time specifications that mod_annodex accepts (npt and various smpte framerates), and start and end times separated by a /.

All you need to do is set up the following Apache config:

ScriptAlias /oggz-chop /usr/bin/oggz-chop Action application/ogg /oggz-chop

, and all your Ogg files will be handled with oggz-chop, which means that you can put a time range on the end, like:

http://www.example.com/candidate_speech.ogv?t=00:23/00:26

The minimal amount of data required to play the section between 23 and 26 seconds will be sent to you, such that it plays back immediately from the time requested. As for caching, it generates Last-Modified HTTP headers, and responds correctly to If-Modified-Since conditional GET requests.

It implements the same chopping algorithm as the Haskell version hogg chop, released in HOgg 0.3.0, so it will insert an Ogg Skeleton track which can give players hints about what time the in-sync audio and video data should start being rendered, and if any of the input files include Skeleton information that will be preserved, and the output will contain only one Skeleton track.

Many thanks to Michael Dale, j^ and John Ferlito for testing out oggz-chop during its development.