How it started...
The Ogg Directshow Filters were written by Zen Kavanagh from Perth, Australia. Zen handed over maintenance of the filters to Cristian Adam in April 2008.
Here is what Zen wrote about the history of the Directshow Filters:
I first began working on ogg media directshow filters whilst under contract to CSIRO's annodex.net project group. Much of the knowledge I needed to write these filters was gained through my work with this project. My initial implementation was for a specific annodex (which uses the ogg encapsulation format) demuxer. Part of my aim of this project was to use the knowledge gained to create a set of filters that works with generic ogg physical streams rather than just a particular physical bitstream format and to release these back to the open source community. There were several limitations to the approach taken to the original annodex filters which is why I decided to start from scratch to design the filter architecture over again with the experience of the first attempt.
Another of my aims of this project is to rewrite the annodex demuxer to use this new design in order for it to be more extensible and easier to work with. This time writing the generic ogg case first and then basing the annodex demuxer on this new design it will increase the consistency of the code between the two modules and provide less trouble integrating new codecs, with the aim of making annodex technology available in the standard applications that come default with windows.
I encourage you all to go and check out the annodex project and to consider coding some applications to utilise this new technology. There are many interesting possibilities this new technology presents to continuous media and search technology which will expand the internet to be a richer more dynamic multimedia experience.
Thankyou to CSIRO's annodex.net project group (Silvia Pfeiffer, Conrad Parker and Andre Pang) for the opportunity to work on this exciting new technology and sparking my interest in directshow and the xiph.org range of codecs.
On the 1st of May 2004, this project began to be maintained in the xiph.org subversion repository. It can be found at svn.xiph.org/trunk/oggdsf/