As André already mentioned we have finally got an Ogg Vorbis Encoder in ActionScript 3. André wrote a lot about the benefits already.
Now what I really like about the encoder is the way we could minimize the encoding time by ~50%! I know two implementations of Ogg Vorbnis. One is written in C and another one in Java. What we did first was just getting it to work and it looked pretty much like the C/Java version. Then we started optimizing the code by comparing the encoding results always to reference files. I am quiet happy because on my machine we reduced the encoding time from 32sec to 16.5sec with simple optimizations and tricks.
Where to go from here? Of course we think the best we can do is to open-source the encoder. But there are a couple of other things in my mind. I started modifing Tamarin and added two functions to the Math class. Those convert a Number to its binary IEEE32 single-precision representation and vice versa. With those two functions we could get huge speed improvements for performance hungry tasks like this one. I hope Adobe will not forget about this as well — there seems to be general problem currently trying to support the simple Flash user on the one hand and the “Flash explorer” on the other hand.
I know you may ask what this feature could be good for, but doing floating point math using bitwise operations is a killer when it comes to performance. We are currently not allowed to do this and there is no reason for that.
