[sword-devel] Linked in audio files

[Greg Hellings]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 11:15 AM, David Haslam <d.haslam at ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Peter,
>
> If you look at the mailing list archives for April 2010, you will find John
> Austin's message that announced xulsword.
>
> Subject: Announcing a new SWORD front end called Xulsword
>
> On the Nabble mirror of this list, you can read this thread
> http://sword-dev.350566.n4.nabble.com/Announcing-a-new-SWORD-front-end-called-Xulsword-tt2023094.html#a2024764
> here .
>
> Before we go our own sweet way on how to add audio markup to OSIS, we should
> take a look at how it was successfully implemented in modules for xulsword
> (aka MK). Even though xulsword is based on a fork of the SWORD API, there is
> much that we could learn from this application.
>
> I have access to some of the OSIS files which John made into MK modules -
> and though I can't distribute these (for copyright reasons), it should be
> acceptable for you and I to study the markup methods and format.

While you're haggling over markup, it would also be wise to
contemplate the audio format of the files to be saved.

MP3 is great and well-known and widely supported - but that support
may or may not be legal without patent licensing fees.  The issue is
murky (see the all-wise WikiPedia for references
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues).  AAC is
probably as widely supported and close to as widely known.  It suffers
from fewer patent issues, though the second paragraph here confuses me
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#Licensing_and_patents).
 Ogg is even more free of such encumberments, but has many detractors
and probably not as widely known support.

Off hand I don't know of any other formats which might be a candidate
for your work.  Support of various front ends might also be worth
considering.  With BibleTime, I know we use the WebKit rendering
engine and that supports WAV, MP3 and AAC and also supports Ogg on
some systems - though whether that works in the Qt embedding of it, I
don't know.  Qt only supports WAV audio through its QSound interface.

I'd suggest choosing wisely and choosing once, so we don't have some
modules containing one format that half our front-ends can't plya, and
another half containing audio that everything can play, etc.

--Greg

>
>
>
> Yours as ever,
> David Haslam
>
>
> --
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> Sent from the SWORD Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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