root/liboggz/trunk/release_notes/liboggz-0.9.5.txt

Oggz 0.9.5 Release
------------------

Oggz comprises liboggz and the command-line tools oggzinfo, oggzdump,
oggzdiff, oggzmerge, oggzrip, oggz-scan and oggz-validate.

liboggz is a C library providing a simple programming interface for reading
and writing Ogg files and streams. Ogg is an interleaving data container
developed by Monty at Xiph.Org, originally to support the Ogg Vorbis audio
format.

This release is available as a source tarball at:

http://www.annodex.net/software/liboggz/download/liboggz-0.9.5.tar.gz

New in this release:

        * Fixed and updated Windows (Visual Studio) support
        - added missing exported symbols, projects for oggz tools.
        (Alex Krumm-Heller, Silvia Pfeiffer)


        * Support for OggPCM (Draft 2, Main header)

        OggPCM is an experimental specification for storing uncompressed
        PCM audio in Ogg bitstreams.

        - liboggz: Recognition of OggPCM timestamps, and support for
        seeking in files that contain OggPCM logical bitstreams.
        - oggzinfo: Display OggPCM header details
        - oggzdump, oggzrip: New [--content-type pcm, -c pcm] option
        to filter on OggPCM
        - oggz-validate: Validate framing of OggPCM logical bitstreams

        This version is installed on http://validator.annodex.org/ for
        online validation of OggPCM files.

        For more information about OggPCM, see:
            http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggPCM


        * ./configure support for large (>2GB) files

        This version adds build configuration support for large files,
        allowing liboggz to operate on files >2GB. This version does
        not introduce any API changes; interfaces such as oggz_tell()
        continue to use off_t externally. However, sequential reading
        and validation of large files is now possible.


        * bug fixes and cleanups:

        - oggz-validate, oggzmerge, oggzdump, oggz-scan, oggzinfo: handle
        unknown content types (Ian Malone)
        - remove deprecated oggzed example
        - various code and documentation build cleanups

About Oggz
----------

Oggz comprises liboggz and the command-line tools oggzinfo, oggzdump,
oggzdiff, oggzmerge, oggzrip, oggz-scan and oggz-validate.

liboggz supports the flexibility afforded by the Ogg file format while
presenting the following API niceties:

        * Full API documentation

        * Comprehensive test suite of read, write and seeking behavior.
        The entire test suite can be run under valgrind if available.

        * Developed and tested on GNU/Linux, Darwin/MacOSX, Win32 and
        Symbian OS. May work on other Unix-like systems via GNU autoconf.
        For Win32: nmake Makefiles, Visual Studio .NET 2003 solution files
        and Visual C++ 6.0 workspace files are provided in the source
        distribution.

        * Strict adherence to the formatting requirements of Ogg bitstreams,
        to ensure that only valid bitstreams are generated; writes can fail
        if you try to write illegally structured packets.

        * A simple, callback based open/read/close or open/write/close
        interface to raw Ogg files.

        * Writing automatically interleaves with packet queuing, and provides   
        callback based notification when this queue is empty

        * A customisable seeking abstraction for seeking on multitrack Ogg
        data. Seeking works easily and reliably on multitrack and multi-codec
        streams, and can transparently parse Theora, Speex, Vorbis, FLAC,
        CMML and Ogg Skeleton headers  without requiring linking to those
        libraries. This allows efficient use on servers and other devices
        that need to parse and seek within Ogg files, but do not need to do
        a full media decode.

Full documentation of the liboggz API, customization and installation,
and mux and demux examples can be read online at:

    http://www.annodex.net/software/liboggz/html/

Tools
-----

The Oggz source tarball also contains the following command-line tools,
which are useful for debugging and testing Ogg bitstreams:

        * oggzinfo: Display information about one or more Ogg files and
        their bitstreams.

        * oggzdump: Hexdump packets of an Ogg file, or revert an Ogg file
        from such a hexdump.

        * oggzdiff: Hexdump the packets of two Ogg files and output
        differences.

        * oggzmerge: Merge Ogg files together, interleaving pages in order
        of presentation time.

        * oggzrip: Extract one or more logical bitstreams from an Ogg file.

        * oggz-scan: Scan an Ogg file and output characteristic landmarks.

        * oggz-validate: Validate the Ogg framing of one or more files.

License
-------

Oggz is Free Software, available under a BSD style license.

More information is available online at the Oggz homepage:

    http://www.annodex.net/software/liboggz/

enjoy :)

--
Conrad Parker
Senior Software Engineer, Continuous Media Web, CSIRO Australia
http://www.annodex.net/   http://www.ict.csiro.au/cmweb/