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Bitrate Peeling with Ogg Vorbis
Yort writes "Thought this might be interesting to some audiophile /.ers - there's been some discussion on the Ogg Vorbis lists, summarized in the most recent Ogg Traffic, about "bitrate peeling". In short, it's where you can simply "peel off" the high resolution data from the ends of an audio stream packet to come up with a smaller, lower quality stream. Brings up a number of geek-cool opportunities."
On my sony audiophile setup, even 128kbit ogg's sound rather weak, 128kbit mp3's sound terrible, and 128k wma audio sounds good but there is still a noticable degration of sound.
Bitrate peeling is not a good idea because it seperates the audio signal, with hi frequency data being seperate from low and mid frequency data. On a fast connection, you would get the full spectrum while on a slow one, you would only get low and mid range frequencies. By chopping the frequencies into seperate bits of data, there is a high possibility that they won't be brought back together properly, causing even more artifacts than are in normal ogg audio. While this might make streams more accesible to low bandwidth users, the resulting sound quality would likely not be better than that of realaudio streams!
While this is a good idea in theory, in practice it would sound unbearably bad.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
Squid
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
You are all in violation of my pending "bit rate peeling and its application to encoded audiostreams" patent. Bit rate peeling can not be performed for internet audio unless you license this technology from me. BTW, this reminds me of my patent for slashdot-like blogging....
I love your mom.
The audiophiles I know pretty much only hang out with your mom.
ogg vorbis probably will never catch on, why bother... maybe a handfull of super-geeks like to rip their collection to ogg, but it will probably never go beyond that.
All the time when Ogg was getting going people said "we need an integer decoder! whaa!". Now Ogg's final and there's an integer decoder. So where are the ogg hardware players? No Ogg-iPod, no Ogg-Nomad. No Nothing? What's the real reason? They shouldn't be screwing around with stuff like this when there are real issues with ogg to be overcome.
And then you listen to it on your crappy computer speakers with the system humming away in the background. Audiophile indeed.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You could do the same thing with your mom.
I've been using your mom.
I ripped your mom.
I have to admit, I'm biased because I'm sleeping with your mom.
FlashPix is similar with OLE Structured Storage thrown in to get Microsoft to participate (much to the agony of anyone who's ever tried to write a FlashPix file parser). PhotoCD is similar except I think it might not be tiled - Kodak was a major partner to Live Picture and even though the original LP format would have worked fine, Kodak wanted something proprietary :-/
It stores the original resolution, only in tiles whose size are about what would fit on a typical monitor. Then it stores half that resolution, tiled again, and so on. I think there are six levels of decimation. The total file size is about twice the normal full-resolution file.
The advantage of this is that you can pan and zoom to any portion of the image quickly. Only a modest amount of scaling would be needed to get to the view the user selected.
The really sexy thing about Live Picture (a high-end grahics editor) is that it never applied time-consuming graphics operations to the full image. Instead it would only render what was necessary to show the results to the user on the screen.
All of the edit commands were saved in a display list, and re-rendered every time you changed the view or edited in some way. You could save your display list in a file that linked to the graphics, and in effect have infinite undo that could be continued across launches of the program.
Each kind of operation you could do to an LP image was a layer - there were monochrome paint layers, multicolor paint layes, distortion layers and so on. You could composite images with image insertion layers. I understand Adobe got the idea for putting layers into Photoshop from Live Picture.
The final rendering to a TIFF file was time consuming, yes, but could be left until the end of the day and ran as a batch job overnight, or offloaded to a separate machine.
This made Live Picture a very complex program to work on. It had about 70 MB of really arcane C++ source code at the time I worked there in 1997.
But it made Photoshop look like a kids toy, because it could easily and very responsively handle the compositing of a half-dozen 200 MB images on a 150 Mhz PowerPC 604 Mac 8500 with 32 MB of RAM - I had machines like that both for my main development machine at the office, and coincidentally I had an identical machine at home (which I'm typing on now, although it's been upgraded several times).
While Live Picture as a company had great technology, unfortunately it failed to compete as a business against Adobe. Read more about it in:
-
The Valley is a Harsh Mistress
After its bankrupcy, Live Picture was acquired by MGI Software of Canada. Later MGI was acquired by Roxio, the Adaptec spin-off that publishes toast and easy cd creator. Roxio publishes a bundle of inexpensive graphics utilities, but I don't think Live Picture is included. That is a sad end for a powerful graphics application that once retailed for $4000.Request your free CD of my piano music.
Proof again that p0rn drives the Internet. What's next lap dancing?
The RIAA can replace the obsolete bits of each packet frame with
their latest DRM trojan code that makes very sure that you don't
accidently have copy-righted music on your computer.
Is there any way to stop corporations from patenting it, without patenting it yourself?
How about without a working implementation?