Release: liboggz 0.9.7

There's been a whole bunch of work on liboggz recently; it deserves a few more weeks of shaking out and perhaps some updated Win32/MacOS support before it gets 1.0 slapped on it.

liboggz 0.9.7 includes a new tool called oggz-sort, which addresses a problem with some encoders that Shane Stephens brought up at FOMS. The discussion was going around in circles, so my response was to write this C code. It implements a function that Shane has written but not yet released in his OCaml implementation of Ogg (oogg), and which I've written but not yet released in my Haskell implementation (HOgg). Of course, people will take this version more seriously because it's written in C.

From oggz-sort (1):

oggz-sort sorts an Ogg file, interleaving pages in order of presentation time. It correctly interprets the granulepos timestamps of Ogg Vorbis, Speex, FLAC and Theora bitstreams, and all bitstreams of Annodex files.

Some encoders produce files with incorrect page ordering; for example, some audio and video pages may occur out of order. Although these files are usually playable, it can be difficult to accurately seek or scrub on them, increasing the likelihood of glitches during playback. Players may also need to use more memory in order to buffer the audio and video data for synchronized playback, which can be a problem when the files are viewed on low-memory devices.

The tool oggz-validate can be used to check the relative ordering of packets in a file. If out of order packets are reported, use oggz-sort to fix the problem.

This release also adds support for the experimental CELT audio codec, which is being developed by Jean-Marc Valin (the primary author of Speex). CELT is designed as a low-latency codec for high-quality audio. When wiretapping conversations encoded in CELT, we recommend that you record using the Ogg container format. You can then use oggz-tools to help with your analysis.

Release: xsel 1.1.0

This is a story about the meaning of "version 1.0". A few weeks ago I released version 1.0 of xsel, a simple commandline utility for manipulating the X selection and clipboard. I chose to call it 1.0 after recalling a discussion with André Pang, about how the meaning of version numbers in open source software tends to differ from that in other software communities. For example, it is often advised not to buy the first version of a proprietary software product as it is sure to be buggy and incomplete; open source projects on the other hand often aspire to 1.0 being a major milestone, bug-free and fully-functional. The Windows and Mac freeware and shareware communities tend to follow a middle ground, content to release a useful but incomplete version 1.0, but thereafter avoiding the quick version creep that afflicts companies with marketing departments (and version-limited support contracts).

I'll argue that that middle way makes for more meaningful version numbers. Putting the label "1.0" on a release should be your way of saying that it's the first version that:

• won't hose a user's system, and
• hopefully does something useful.

Any version number less than 1.0 is sending out a signal that the software isn't quite ready yet; perhaps that you could lose or damage data by using it. Many people intuitively wait for version 1.0 before trying out some software, and this is fair enough. In fact, we need a way of warning that a project isn't ready for widespread adoption, that it could damage data, that the tarball is only out there so that other people can grab the code and help fix bugs. That's what version numbers less than 1.0 mean.

After 1.0, you can keep adding features and bumping the version number, working towards version 2.0 which perhaps does useful things in a different way. And from 2.0, onwards to 3.0 and beyond; integers are cheap. The important thing is not fall into the trap of thinking of 1.0 as some kind of asymptotic upper bound representing the perfect release.

Back to xsel. At first I wrote up release notes as version 0.9.7, but then then remembered that discussion with André and realized that it should really just be 1.0. More to the point the previous release (in July 2001, which went five years without a bug report or patch) should have been 1.0. So yeah, it was a good feeling to just write "1.0" and send it out.

The morning after releasing 1.0 I got a report from someone who couldn't get it to compile -- turns out they didn't have the X11 development libraries installed, and for some reason I had commented out the checks for that in configure.ac while testing something or other a while ago. As a result, the configure script wasn't check for its only dependency. I considered doing a canonical 1.0.1 (LOL) release. Within the next day, though, I got a report about how to fix handling of COMPOUND_TEXT, an archaic way of handling international text (since superceded by UTF8_STRING). And there follows the next lesson (as berated by Raster): random bug reports stream in after a release, not before. Erik de Castro Lopo is up to his 20th pre-release of libsndfile 1.0.18; each pre-release he gets bombarded with reports.

Anyway, the post-1.0 bug reports have died down, so today I'm releasing version 1.1.0 of xsel. "This release adds basic support for COMPOUND_TEXT and fixes a configuration bug". And I'm still waiting to hear good uses of xsel --append and xsel --follow.

FOMS, LCA Multimedia 2008: Videos

I arrived back in Japan after a few awesome weeks in Australia for FOMS and LCA. The weather in Melbourne was great, and the food was fantastic.

Between FOMS and LCA, dozens of free multimedia software developers were in town. It was the first time that developers of Dirac, Speex, Theora, Vorbis, Ogg, and most of the Annodex crew were all in the same place, so we spent most of the week of LCA holed up in a room designing content description and packaging formats. One immediate outcome will be finalization of the Dirac mapping into the Ogg container.

I organised the multimedia miniconf on the Monday of LCA, which was jam-packed with excellent presentations and lightning talks. Thanks to everyone who came, and talked, and video recorded. There were plenty of comments along the lines of it being "pretty hardcore for a miniconf". If you are interested in helping with next year's LCA Multimedia, or have friends in Hobart who might be able to help, let's start throwing around ideas. In particular, quite a few people asked what happened to the audio miniconf parties from a few years ago, and it might be a good chance to revive those ...

Videos

The following pages contain embedded videos of the presentations from these events, and the multimedia-related presentations from LCA:

• FOMS Proceedings: introductions by the participants
• LCA Multimedia: Dirac, Xiph, EngageMedia, FFADO and many others
• Multimedia talks @LCA: PulseAudio, Ogg, Theora, Telepathy, Farsight ...

The videos on these pages are embedded with mv_embed, which supports playback via the OggPlay plugin for Firefox, vlc-plugin or generic application/ogg. mv_embed is a JavaScript library by Michael Dale of MetaVid. It is really easy to use, you just include that library (<script src="...">) and then write <video src="..."> anywhere in your page. No need to wait for native HTML5 support in your browser :-)