Minutes of the Xiph.org Monthly Meeting for November 2003

Author: Carsten Haese
Contact: carsten@xiph.org
Date: November 15, 2003

Table of Contents

1   Introduction

The monthly meeting for November 2003 took place on November 2, 2003, at midnight UTC in the IRC channel #xiphmeet on irc.freenode.net. The following people were present, in alphabetical order, IRC nicknames in parentheses:

The meeting was moderated by Ralph Giles.

2   IceShare

The meeting began with a discussion of IceShare. IceShare is being developed by Arc to help Indymedia solve their bandwidth problems by implementing a peer-to-peer streaming system. This approach is similar to BitTorrent and Peercast, but BitTorrent can't stream live content, and Peercast can't provide static content, and it has security problems. Hence, Arc is developing IceShare, which is designed to be more secure than Peercast and to handle both live and static content. Additionally, it is designed to support multiple bitrates for the same content.

Details about IceShare can be found at http://wiki.xiph.org/IceShare, and the protocol is described at http://wiki.xiph.org/IceT. Arc has a partially working tracker, the server side, implemented in python. Stan has volunteered to work on the client side. The idea is to build an iceshare library that could be linked to a number of player applications to reduce coding overlap.

3   Logos

Next, a few logo ideas from the advocacy mailing list (see http://www.xiph.org/archives/advocacy/0528.html) were discussed. While the logos that Sheryl designed a few months ago are nice for the webpages, they are not suitable for portable players or any other situation where color is at a premium. Everyone agreed that there should be a set of official logos to use for such situations. However, no concensus to adopt any of the suggested logos could be reached, so the matter has been tabled.

4   Status Reports

4.1   Vorbis 1.0.1

Ralph started off the Status Reports segment by noting that, sadly, the Vorbis 1.0.1 release is still being held up by unresolved Win32 SDK questions.

4.2   Speex

Jean-Marc then gave us an update on Speex. He is working on a fixed-point version, which is coming along nicely. It's already much faster on fpu-less processors than the original code, but there's a lot left to do to reach Jean-Marc's goal of real-time encoding on processors with clock speeds of less than 200 MHz.

4.3   Theora

Ralph informed us that Dan Miller has resurfaced. Dan has found a day job and doesn't have much time to work on the Theora specification, so Ralph and Timothy have been picking up the slack.

Timothy and Mauricio have completed a proof-of-concept lossless VP3-to-Theora converter, and have definitively determined that Theora up until alpha 2 uses a different coordinate system than VP3. This has been changed to VP3's coordinate system to allow for real lossless transcoding from VP3 to Theora. This incompatible bitstream change will appear in alpha 3, along with some other changes for future flexibility that Timothy came up with while working on his improved encoder implementation.

4.4   Icecast

Ed and Karl finished off the Status Updates section with an update on Icecast. The code has reached a certain level of maturity and has been running well for a while now, so it was agreed to make a beta release soon. A milestone checklist will be put on the wiki.

5   SCALE

The last item on the agenda was a planning meeting for Xiph's presence at the Southern California Linux Expo. Xiph.org will have a booth there, and Monty is scheduled to give a talk. Since this didn't concern everyone, the meeting was adjourned, and the planning proceeded after the meeting.


Meeting Minutes for the November 2003 Monthly Meeting