ginger’s thoughts

The IETF has just ratified RFC 5334 “Ogg Media Types”, which I have co-authored.

The new Ogg MIME types are as follows:

• audio/ogg for all Ogg files that contain predominantly audio, such as Ogg Vorbis files (.ogg or .oga), Ogg Speex files (.spx) or Ogg FLAC files. The file extension recommended to be used is .oga, but .ogg will continue to be used for Ogg Vorbis I files for backwards compatibility.
• video/ogg for all Ogg files that contain predominantly video, such as Ogg Theora or Ogg Dirac files. The file extension recommended to be used is .ogv. Please stop using .ogg for Ogg Theora files, since that causes havoc for any application trying to determine which application to use for opening such a file.
• application/ogg used to be the MIME type recommended for any Ogg encapsulated file. This is obsoleted by the new RFC. Instead, application/ogg is a generic MIME type that can be used for Ogg files containing custom content tracks. This may e.g. be a Ogg file with 5 vorbis, 2 speex, 2 theora, 5 CMML, 2 Kate, and a custom image tracks. Such files have to use the Skeleton extension to Ogg to be able to describe the content of the file. The file extension recommended to be used is .ogx.

The RFC also specifies the possibility of using codec parameters to the MIME types to specify directly within the MIME type what codecs are contained inside the files. This may for example be “video/ogg; codecs=’dirac,speex,CMML’”.

More details on these decisions and on further considered MIME types are in the Xiph wiki.

Disclaimer: I had no influence on the funny number game that happened between the obsoleted rfc3534 and the new rfc5334.

Happy MIME-typing!!

Have you ever been haunted by an old open source package that you wrote once, published, and then forgot about?

The BSD community has just reminded me of the MPEG audio analysis toolkit Maaate that I wrote at CSIRO when I first came to Australia and that was then published through the CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences division.

The BSD guys were going to remove it from their repositories, because since I left CSIRO more than 2 years ago, CSIRO has taken down the project pages and the code, so there were no active project pages available any longer. I’m glad they contacted me before they did so.

Since it is an open source project, I have now resurrected the old pages at Sourceforge. They are available from http://maaate.sourceforge.net/. I have re-instated the relevant weg pages and documentation and updated all the links. I discovered that we did some cool things then and that it may indeed be worth preservation for the future. I expect Sourceforge is up to the task.

Thanks very much, BSD community and welcome back, MPEG Maaate!

The Foundations of Open Media Software workshop has just extended its deadline for submission of registrations requests with travel sponsorship.

FOMS addresses hot topics - such as the new <video> and <audio> tags in HTML5, the uptake and development of open video codecs like Ogg Theora, BBC’s Dirac and SUN’s OMS codec and their native support in Firefox, open audio & media frameworks and players such as gstreamer, ffmpeg, vlc or xine, or the standardisation of audio APIs across platforms. Further topics are listed in the CFP.

In previous years, FOMS has stimulated heated technical discussions and amazing new developments in open media software, such as the creation of libsydneyaudio, the uptake of liboggplay, the creation of Xiph ROE, or the creation of the new Ogg CELT codec.

Video proceedings of last years’ workshops are here. There are also community goals that were set in 2008 and 2007 and provide ongoing challenges.

You should definitely attend, if you are an open media software hacker. This is a chance to get to know others in the community personally and clear up those long-standing issues that need a face-to-face to get solved. Also, it’s a great social event not to be missed. As a bonus, you can spend the week after FOMS at LCA, the world-famous Australian Linux hackers conference, and deepen your relationships in the community. Come and join in the fun in January 2009, Summer in Hobart, Tasmania.

liboggplay is a library that vastly simplifies the decoding and playback of Ogg encapsulated audio-visual content for programmers. It abstracts away from the complexity of libogg’s encapsulation pages, codec packets, and encoded data, giving the programmer the freedom to work with audio-visual streams, video frames, and audio samples. It does everything apart from the actual display of audio and video and has thus been selected as the thinnest library to provide support for Ogg Theora/Vorbis in Firefox’s new HTML5 <video> and <audio> tag implementation.

Shane Stephens, now with Google, implemented most of liboggplay while working at CSIRO on the Annodex project. Chris Double picked up liboggplay for Mozilla/Firefox, where it got committed to trunk only this week. Many others have and continue to provide patches. And finally, yesterday, I made an actual first tarball release of liboggplay.

There is only one little hick-up: liboggplay doesn’t actually have a maintainer. So, we are now looking to find somebody who is highly enthusiastic about open media codecs, has experience in C programming, can compile and test liboggplay on all major operating systems (probably set it up on a build farm) and has enough time to react swiftly to the need of bug fixes. We don’t want people’s Firefoxes to choke on Ogg content, but rather amaze them about how easy to handle and nicely integrated Ogg works on the Web.

One of the big next challenges for liboggplay is the implementation of support for Ogg Dirac - the BBC’s wavelet-based video codec. Mozilla, would be very keen to get Dirac support into liboggplay and thus diversify the open codecs supported in Firefox.

If you want to become the new maintainer for liboggplay, or want to implement Ogg Dirac support into liboggplay, or do both, get in touch with me and we’ll get you set up.

Mozilla have just published a brief statement that they have taken legal advice before they chose to support Ogg Theora/Vorbis natively in the Firefox codebase. Seems like the risk of submarine patents was not large enough to hold back.

Apple and Microsoft should follow this example, undertake their own patent risk assessment (rather than hiding behind Nokia), and make an informed decision on whether or not to support Ogg Theora in their browsers.

The old excuse that there hasn’t been a large player in the market yet that supports the codec is now not true any longer. The ball is in your court to show us better arguments for not supporting the codec!

What a day for great news!

Chris Blizzard and Chris Double of Mozilla have just announced that native Ogg Theora and Vorbis support is now available in the trunk of Firefox’s codebase. Compiles of that codebase have the support enabled by default, which means that very soon now any Firefox that gets installed on any platform will come with built-in Ogg Theora/Vorbis support out of the box.

This is exciting in more than one way.

First of all: it is a browser implementation of the new HTML5 video tag currently in the process of standardisation. Opera is the only other browser that has support for the video tag also using Ogg Theora as the baseline codec, but Opera’s support is in an experimental branch, while Firefox will be the first to have native support.

The choice to include Ogg Theora natively is a huge step forward on Mozilla’s behalf considering the submarine patent debate that has been raging around this codec ever since it was removed from the HTML5 specification as baseline codec. So, maybe the Mozilla lawyers believe the risk of this threat is negligible and if they have, other browser vendors may follow.

This is a big day for open media technology and a big day for the future of video on the Web.

It is important because the availability of free and unencumbered video and audio codecs that are natively supported on the Web will make a huge difference in progressing the capabilities of video on the Web. As an example, look at the efforts of Annodex, where we are creating video webs through a video format with embedded hyperlinks and annotations. To make this feasible, you need a standard and open format for the time-aligned hyperlinks and annotations, which will only work with a flexible open video format. This is just an example: open captioning and karaoke formats, open overlay formats and many other extensions to video formats will now be feasible. The golden age of online video is starting.

Michael Dale’s metavid project is giving us a taste of this future. Video can be searched on time-aligned annotations and only the relevant video segment will be retrieved. Video segments can be addressed by temporal hyperlinks and recombined easily into new mash-ups simply through the creation of a list of temporal hyperlinks. How powerful this will be when we do it across sites! This takes video into a completely new dimension.

Now, let’s step back again from the future to the current exciting news. I am particularly proud of the input that Annodex people have made to this development - code from people like Conrad Parker, Andre Pang, Zen Kavanagh, Shane Stephens, and many others.

Chris Double from Mozilla has been implementing the Firefox Ogg Theora support for more than a year and is using Shane Stephens’ liboggplay library, which was originally developed by CSIRO and is in the code repository of the Annodex Association. liboggplay requires libraries from Xiph.org (libogg, libvorbis, libtheora) and from Annodex (liboggz and libfishsound) to work. All of this has to work across operating system platforms.

It is an enormous achievement and I congratulate the open media technology community on this big success.

…because of your outstanding contributions to Australia’s computing sector, but haven’t had the chance to put yourself out there? Or you have a friend who really deserves an award for his excellent work? Here’s your chance.

This year’s NSW State Pearcey Award is open for applications and nominations. It is one of the only Australian awards that singles out individuals and their contribution to the Australian ICT profession early in their career (where “early” is used rather flexibly to mean anyone who has not yet reached the end of their career).

If you have made any outstanding technical innovations or created novel commercial businesses in IT in NSW, you should consider sending in your CV.

Previous award winners can be seen here. There are some excellent people - even some from the open source community. In 2006, James Dalziel of MELCOE won the award. Jeff and Pia Waugh won last year. And I was myself highly commended in 2006 for the Annodex work we did at CSIRO.

You’ll need to send in the completed nomination form and your CV before the end of August. Good luck!

I just tried comparing the different date & time selection plugins that are available for Rails and because the wiki page at rubyonrails.org is dated and I cannot edit it, I decided to write this brief blog post to save you the 20 min it took me to locate the currently available plugins and their demos:

• CalendarDateSelect plugin (20k JS): demo - has different colours, small, time selection
• Unobtrusive JavaScript date-picker plugin (80k JS): demo - keyboard control, flexible date selection, i18n
• Datetime Toolbooks engine (85k JS): demo - uses engines plugin, not very pretty, nice built-in drop-down menus, introduces date grammar
• DHTML Calendar plugin (76k JS): demo - flexible parameters to make it popup or selectable

So now you can compare and pick the one that suits you best. Enjoy!

UPDATE: John just told me that there is a list of other plugins at the bottom of the CalendarDateSelect plugin page - doh!

The W3C has just released a set of proposed charters for a new W3C Video in the Web activity with a request for feedback.

The following working groups are proposed:

1. Timed Text Working Group
2. Media Fragments Working Group
3. Media Annotations Working Group

Two further ones under investigation are:

1. Codecs and containers
2. Best practices for video and audio content

It is worth checking out the site and the three different working groups they are planning to create. Sure - the codec discussion is a big one. But it’s not as big as some of the other activities as to new functionality for video on the Web.

In our rail application we do a lot of string conversions to other data types, including Boolean. Unfortunately, ruby does not provide a conversion method to_bool (which I find rather strange, to be honest).

Based a blog post by Chris Roos in October 2006, we developed a rails plugin that enables the “to_bool” conversion.

“to_bool” works on the strings “true” and “false” and any capitalisation of these, and on numbers, as well as on nil. Other strings raise an ArgumentError.

Examples are as follows:

'true'.to_bool #-> true
'TrUe'.to_bool #-> true
true.to_bool #-> true
1.to_bool #-> true
5.to_bool #-> true
-9.to_bool #-> true
nil.to_bool #-> false
'false'.to_bool #-> false
'FaLsE'.to_bool #-> false
false.to_bool #-> false
0.to_bool #-> false

You can find the plugin here as a tarball. To install it, simply decompress the to_bool directory into your vendor/plugins directory.