1   Introduction

The monthly meeting for September 2003 took place on September 7, 2003, at midnight UTC in the IRC channel #xiphmeet on irc.xiph.org. The following people were present, in alphabetical order:

• Active Participants (IRC nicknames in parentheses)
  • Arc, Ogg Writ developer (Arc)
  • Ralph Giles, Theora project leader and Xiph.org sysadmin (rillian)
  • Carsten Haese, Ogg Traffic Editor, Secretary (purple)
  • Manuel Lora (vanguardist)
  • Jack Moffit, Executive Director (jack)
  • Nathan Sharfi, Webmaster (adiabatic/primer)
  • Timothy Terriberry, Theora developer (derf)
• Observers (IRC nicknames)
  • Aram1

The meeting was moderated by Jack Moffitt and Ralph Giles.

2   Status Updates

Jack and Ralph are working on getting Windows and Mac OS builds of the Vorbis 1.0.1 bugfix release going. Monty has finished his work on 1.0.1 and has moved on to wrapping up some loose contracts, after which he will work on OggFile.

3   Theora Updates

Ralph has accepted the position as the project leader for Theora. This means that any complaints, compliments, or offers to help regarding Theora should be directed at him.

Timothy has begun work on an experimental HVS (Human Visual System) tuned Theora encoder. It's coming along, but has some ways to go before being useful.

Dan Miller is still busy working on the Python specification and reference implementation. Since this must be done before Theora can be released, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Another open item is whether Theora needs a flip bit to allow for lossless transcoding from VP3. The jury, i.e. Mauricio Piacentini, is still out on this one. He thinks it should be possible to achieve without a flip bit, and he is working on a transcoder implementation to test his theory.

4   Theora Demo Page

Following the Theora updates there was a brief discussion about a Theora demo page that would showcase Theora once it is released. This demo page would contain sample clips and links to applications, preferably compact, that can play Theora video.

Regarding content, Arc offered to provide clips from interviews with different free software developers talking about their projects. Offers or ideas for additional possibilities are welcome.

Regarding players, one strong contender is Mauricio's 'splayer' example player. Since it is portable, it would only need a minimal GUI to be made into a lightweight downloadable player. While projects like xine and mplayer already support Theora, they aren't small downloads, and it is not known whether they actually run on Windows.

5   Subtitle Stream Format

Arc is developing a subtitle format with the working title Ogg Writ. The specification can be found at http://wiki.xiph.org/OggWrit. Arc has a working reference implementation of a raw stream encoder and decoder, but it hasn't been tied to the Ogg framework for technical reasons. The first reason is that Ogg needs to be extended to handle discontinuous streams. The second reason is that Arc is waiting for Monty to finish the OggFile library.

Meeting Minutes for the September 2003 Monthly Meeting