How to help
This page is intended to collect ideas and areas where new participants can contribute to Xiph.org initiatives. Because this is an open wiki not all of these points have been reviewed with core Xiph developers. It is always best to coordinate your efforts on the relevant Xiph mailing lists and IRC channels.
One of the best ways people can contribute is by using the tools and formats. This accomplishes two primary goals:
- By providing materials in free formats you help lower the barriers to adoption for others
- By using the tools you will discover problems which you can report contributing to further development and refinement
OggDSF specific activities
Directshow is the windows video codec API, OggDSF provides support for Vorbis/Theora/Speex/Flac and Ogg in directshow.
- Testing. Much of the Xiph.org community are run various unix-like operating systems. While OggDSF is widely used, it isn't frequently used by much of the more experienced Xiph.org community and hasn't has sufficient scrutiny.
Theora specific activities
- Identifying videos where 1.1 or 1.2-development (ptalarbvorm) produce significantly worse results than prior versions. (These case is important compared to "works worse than some random format" because the differences are more likely to be actionable rather than just chance consequences related to differences in the encoders overall behaviour)
Vorbis specific activities
- Identifying test samples where Vorbis encodings at very high quality are not completely transparent under careful listening tests.
- Identifying test cases that exemplify the improvements in the current AoTuV development. (Helps with AoTuV merging)
- Identifying test samples where Vorbis performs worse than other formats.