From what I've read, Xiph.org are a bit slow at updating Ogg Vorbis and so some enthusiastic open source people have taken it upon themselves to improve it. The best of these improved Ogg Vorbis encoders appears to be aoTuV Beta4.51 which can be downloaded from the authors homepage

http://www.geocities.jp/aoyoume/aotuv/

The thing that's confusing me though is that there are two encoders mentioned..

1) Win32 reference binary
Download Ogg Vorbis aoTuV beta4.51 Encoder

2) OggEnc Win32 version (reference)
Download OggEnc aoTuV beta4.51

What is the difference between them ((1) is named venc.exe, the other oggenc.exe) ?


Secondly, someone else who goes by the name Blacksword has produced highly optimized versions of the aoTuV encoder which are available from his home page:

http://homepage3.nifty.com/blacksword/

On my test file, the blacksword encoder was quite a bit faster (40%-50%), but the resulting .ogg file was not byte-for-byte exactly the same as the aoTuV encoded .ogg (although they were both 2.55MB).

Why are they not exactly the same ?

Has Blacksword made even more improvements (on top of the work done by aoTuV) to the encoding algorithm, as well as the optimizations ?


Last of all, would I be right in thinking that the Blacksword version the best version to use (in my case oggenc283_sse_lancer20060529.zip since I'm using a Pentium III-Mobile which only has SSE) ?

After a bit of poking around, I came across the following page which answered all my questions

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....ded_Ogg_Vorbis