The ogg-support is listed as the The Pearl for OS2008, thanks! :)

Even though the ogg-support has got nice ratings in the download page, it doesn’t work perfectly on the OS2008. Most of the issues has some sort of workaround so I decided to make a summary post of them.

Ogg-support breaks VOIP calls

Ogg-support adds Speex voice codec to the system and it seems that the VOIP client advertises it as the first choice. If both parties have it installed, it’s selected. But. The VOIP engine (or whatever) doesn’t know or just refuses to use Speex, so the VOIP stream is not actually sent, properly at least.

If you delete the Speex’ GStreamer plugin, the calls seems to work nicely.

Bug report (#2811).

All Oggs from Map are listed in Media Player

The Metalayer Crawler adds all known media files to the Media Player’s Library. With ogg-support also Ogg files are recognized and added to the Library. Problem is that the Map application includes almost 2000 Oggs with N810 so they are added to the Library too.

A workaround is mentioned in the ogg-support’s help forum. It requires editing the SQL database after the files are added to the Library.

Bug report (#2772).

File Manager doesn’t launch Media Player for Oggs

I had to modify the mime type XML a bit to get File Manager to recognize videos and audios in Ogg container separately instead of just showing all *.ogg files as e.g. audio/x-vorbis. To be specific I had to remove the *.ogg pattern from the XML file.

It seems that the hildon_mime_open_file() in libhildonmime doesn’t launch the file without the *.ogg pattern tag in XML.

No workaround for this one.

Bug report (#2521).

PS. Many problems are reported in the Internet Tablet Talk’s forums. I don’t follow those frequently so please notify me in the garage’s forums about possible bugs, issues or workarounds. I do get a instant mail notification about those. Thanks.

Thanks to Joni Valtanen the Media Player should now play Oggs without restarting the device.

As another minor change I added NoDisplay to ogg-support’s MP’s .desktop file to prevent it from showing in the menus.

I added initial support for the built-in Media Player. It’s untrivial to get everything working properly as the FileManager, the Metalayer Crawler, and the Media Player are all close source applications and their behaviour is not really documented anywhere.

The change log:

• Added OGG support for the built-in media player.
• Updated ogg related mime types from freedesktop.org.xml (excluding *.ogg patterns).
• Added icons for the new mime types.
• Removed dependency to floating point vorbis library.

Known issues:

• The FM doesn’t now how to start the new mime types.
• The Metalayer Crawler doesn’t fill in the meta data (artist etc.) for the ogg files.
• I removed the *.ogg patterns from the mime file because with it neither the FM nor the Crawler checked the real mime type for files but just put the first mime type with *.ogg pattern.

The Crawler did fill in the artist etc. for my ogg files at one point, but I don’t know why. If you have any hints for these issues, I’m all ears :)

PS. The MP now plays oggs with Theora video and Vorbis audio too :)

The 0.2 release includes dependency to the Speex (libspeex1 and the corresponding gst plugin in gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-kulve). The Speex is compiled from SVN trunk.

I made some light (just looked the numbers, no playback) performance tests. The two tables below show how much time in seconds it took to encode a 60 second audio clip (8000Hz, mono, 16bit). The first column shows the complexity used (scale is 0-10) and the rest of the columns show the encoding time with different qualities (0-10).

no VBR, no DTX, no VAD:

c/q      1       2       3       5       7
0       12       8      10      14      11
1       12       9      10      15      11
2       13       8      12      16      16
3       13      10      15      22      19
4       13      10      16      23      20

VBR, DTX, VAD:

c/q      1       2       3       5       7
0       10      10      11      14      16
1        9      10      13      14      16
2       10      12      13      15      18
3       11      13      15      19      22
4       11      13      17      20      24

The next table shows the difference between fixed point and floating point versions.

c        fixed     float
0        11        17
1        11        18
2        13        20
3        19        29

So, use the fixed point Speex API, if possible (the gst doesn’t use it). If using the floating point API, the libspeex will make the conversion.

For VoIP a good quality setting could be quality 7, complexity 2 and VBR, VAD, and DTX on.

The Internet Tablets don’t support Ogg natively, so there has been some open source projects to add it. I made yet another one.

Features:

• Adds application/ogg and audio/x-ogg mime types
• Add GnomeVFS mime type icons for above
• Depends on ogg, vorbis and theora libs and on the corresponding GStreamer plugins

See project page, home page or install it (conflicts with kilikali-codecs-meta).

For an open source player, see kilikali.