liboggplay is a library that vastly simplifies the decoding and playback of Ogg encapsulated audio-visual content for programmers. It abstracts away from the complexity of libogg’s encapsulation pages, codec packets, and encoded data, giving the programmer the freedom to work with audio-visual streams, video frames, and audio samples. It does everything apart from the actual display of audio and video and has thus been selected as the thinnest library to provide support for Ogg Theora/Vorbis in Firefox’s new HTML5 <video> and <audio> tag implementation.

Shane Stephens, now with Google, implemented most of liboggplay while working at CSIRO on the Annodex project. Chris Double picked up liboggplay for Mozilla/Firefox, where it got committed to trunk only this week. Many others have and continue to provide patches. And finally, yesterday, I made an actual first tarball release of liboggplay.

There is only one little hick-up: liboggplay doesn’t actually have a maintainer. So, we are now looking to find somebody who is highly enthusiastic about open media codecs, has experience in C programming, can compile and test liboggplay on all major operating systems (probably set it up on a build farm) and has enough time to react swiftly to the need of bug fixes. We don’t want people’s Firefoxes to choke on Ogg content, but rather amaze them about how easy to handle and nicely integrated Ogg works on the Web.

One of the big next challenges for liboggplay is the implementation of support for Ogg Dirac – the BBC’s wavelet-based video codec. Mozilla, would be very keen to get Dirac support into liboggplay and thus diversify the open codecs supported in Firefox.

If you want to become the new maintainer for liboggplay, or want to implement Ogg Dirac support into liboggplay, or do both, get in touch with me and we’ll get you set up.