It's amazing how software sidetracks can plow through years of time. I'm finally getting back to Vorbis (and other audio development) after a minor two year video distraction that saw the completion of a new experimantal Theora encoder (Thusnelda) last year, and the beginning of the next experimental Theora encoder which Tim has named Ptalarbvorm. Ptalarbvorm is already showing further large improvements over Thusnelda (honestly, I think he's already doubled again on Thusnelda).
But this post is about Vorbis.
One thing on the original Vorbis bullet list was surround encoding. Vorbis was always surround capable and the software is happy to encode as many channels as you like, but once you're past stereo, everything is encoded as entirely discrete channels. This hasn't been so bad really; despite discrete channels, Vorbis's coding efficiency compares favorably to other surround-capable formats. That said, Vorbis can do better.
When beginning surround optimization work on Vorbis, I found the encoder handled remapping the channel order of input formats, but it didn't always do it properly (FLAC and some WAV inputs were frotzed). I also found that ogg123 needed updating to handle output order. These improvements will be released in vorbis-tools 1.4.0 sometime soon.
The hard part of the tool updates turned out to be libao, which both had no concept of channel ordering, and had also bitrotted substantially while maintainerless. The idea had been that Lennart Poettering's SydneyAudio was going to replace libao so there was no sense continuing to develop libao. We'd just use libao while we waited and not put any more resources into it. Unfortunately, Lennart has been entirely occupied fighting his PulseAudio battles, and this is frankly a more important use of his time. SydneyAudio is no closer to completion than it was a few years ago. We can't continue to wait for it.
So, I'm announcing the resumption of active development and maintenance of libao until such time as there's something better to replace it.
I've made up a surround demo page (like the ones I made during Thusnelda development) with more details on vorbis-tools, libao, and Vorbis's in-progress surround hacking. It goes into alot more detail about Vorbis's surround and channel coupling system with diagrams and samples. I hope folks like it!
