Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

Alan Cox on free software non-coders

Posted Sep 24, 2007 12:57 UTC (Mon) by zooko (subscriber, #2589)
In reply to: Alan Cox on free software non-coders by coriordan
Parent article: Building a community around your open source project (Red Hat Magazine)

I wonder why it is encoded in Vorbis instead of Speex. I wonder if it would be better (clarity/size) if Speex encoded.

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Sep 24, 2007 13:31 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

The clarity/size would surely be better, but there's also the question of software compatibility.

For this same reason, Wikipedia uses Ogg Vorbis for it's spoken recordings of articles. I've heard there was a long fight about whether to use mp3 for compatibility reasons or whether to support free formats. The free formats won in the end, but they didn't want to weaken their position by advocating the even-less-supported speex format.

Alan Cox on free software non-coders

Posted Sep 24, 2007 13:51 UTC (Mon) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Well, I'm certainly glad that wikipedia uses a free format.

Does anyone have access to the source of the Alan Cox speech? I'm curious how Speex would compare.

pretty sure it's not available

Posted Sep 24, 2007 14:02 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

I'm pretty sure that only the ogg was put online. I had asked one of the organisers for it and he pointed me to where it could be gotten:

http://blog.signal2noise.co.uk/cgi-bin/blosxom.pl/technic...