Listen Now: Luc's Heated Talk From [email protected]

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Listen Now: Luc's Heated Talk From [email protected]

The most heated talk this year during FOSDEM in the X.Org development room was certainly the talk by Luc Verhaegen with his ambitions to clean up the Linux graphics driver stack. Building the entire X.Org stack can be a mess and there is certainly areas to improve upon in the development process and making it easier for end-users and others to test out this latest code...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Nzk5MA

[bugmenot]

Open Alternative to MP3

Phoronix Team,

Thank you for going to the effort to provide Luc's FOSDEM talk. Unfortunately, the MP3 format is proprietary and has patents surrounding it which means the majority of Linux distros are unable to legally provide support for it out-of-the-box. Please consider offering all of your content (including audio) in an open, patent-free format. Ogg Vorbis is an unencumbered lossy audio codec that has excellent performance compared to MP3. It even supports features unavailable in MP3 such as gapless playback and re-occuring metadata names. Another benefit to using Ogg Vorbis is that it is natively supported in browsers such as Opera, Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Finally, almost all Linux-based desktop distributions include support for Ogg Vorbis out-of-the-box in their media players.

Other open audio codecs include Ogg Speex (a lossy codec optimized for encoding human speech) and FLAC (a lossleess codec that preserves the original audio and enables anyone to encode into a alternative format if they choose).

Open file formats are important because they make it easier for all users to access content now as well as ensure that content has a good chance of being accessible in the future. Other websites[1] are realizing the benefits (not just for themselves but for their users as well) of providing content in unencumbered formats. As a website geared towards Linux users, there are few reasons not to provide your content in an open format that your users can access easily and legally.


[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/22878/OS...ailable_in_OGG

[karl]

I second the above comment. If phoronix doesn't do it then what can we expect from other windows only websites?

[curaga]

Thanks for providing a download link. Half expected an audio-only flash blob, but was very glad to be proven wrong

[bugmenot]

Sorry, but the talk is useless without the video. He keeps pointing at stuff on the slides and never mentions what he's pointing at, so if you can't see him, the whole talk doesn't make any sense. So please, PLEASE find a place to host the video...

[miles]

Thanks a lot for the audio Michael! The sound is actually really good for a conference, far improved from previous attempts, and that makes it really easy to understand.

Looking forward to the video (and yes, OGG would be nice instead but I understand it's not as easy as solutions one is already used to and that have proved to work in the past).

[miles]

Michael, the site you're using for Luc's talk audio file allows using OGG instead of MP3. Would you mind if I tried and reuploaded your file as an OGG file to see if it would work?

[L33F3R]

ill convert it and up for ya'll, hold your holding.

[L33F3R]

ughh the stupid edit limit. I mean if permission is granted for me to do so. in relation to the post above.

[miles]

Michael, there's two things:

- you're using stereo audio, thus doubling your filesize bandwidth use for no reason, since your microphone was mono (and stereo wouldn't add anything to a talk);
- 22050Hz is more than enough for voice (you could easily drop lower than that, but 22050Hz means you're sure you're not loosing any quality).

Using Audacity, the resulting OGG audio file (Mono, 22050Hz, q=2) is 13Mo from the 73Mo the MP3 file was using.

I can provide you with a quick howto including screenshots for Audacity (or CLI if you prefer), else I could convert any files you want anytime (but with a delay involved in checking my inbox ) as thanks for your site and your efforts. I've spend quite some time on audio/video recording, editing and encoding for both work and personal interest so if it can be put to good use you'd be welcome