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Obi

Obi is a DAISY/NISO production tool that is easy to use, accessible and internationalized. Obi provides a powerful editing environment that supports the structured audio recording paradigm. Obi enables anyone with a minimal amount of training to produce rich yet accessible Digital Talking Books. By empowering mainstream users, Obi brings the benefits of DAISY technology to a broader range of consumers. Although the DAISY reading experience was originally designed for print-disabled users (i.e. blind, visually-impaired, dyslexic, etc.), the technology can benefit mainstream users too. In contexts where time and cost constraints do not normally allow the production of synchronized multimedia (e.g. classroom environment), Obi can unlock the potential of producers and consumers (e.g. teachers and students).

Behind the scenes, Obi utilizes the Urakawa SDK for multimedia authoring.

Obi is free software; it is available at no cost, and its source code is available for anyone to run, modify and redistribute. Obi is released under the LGPL license.

Features

By design, Obi is a simple tool with a small feature set:

  • Runs on Windows XP (SP2) and Vista; uses .Net and DirectX for audio.
  • Support for audio-only book editing with a table of contents (in DAISY terms, this means NCX-only DTBs)
  • Support for uncompressed RIFF/WAVE audio format while production and support for exporting DAISY book in mp3 format for distribution.
  • Full accessibility (keyboard navigation, support for screen readers)
  • Internationalization

Availability

Obi RC3 is available from november 18th, 2008 and can be downloaded for Windows XP SP2 and Vista

Please get the updated Pipeline-lite as well and read the Pipeline installation instructions

Obi entered RC stage on october 24th, 2008 with release of RC1. Previous RC releases for windows XP sp2 and windows vista are available below:
release date october 31st, 2008
download Obi RC2

release date: october 24th, 2008
download Obi RC1.

The second beta version of Obi was released on Friday July 26th, 2008 and is available for download for Windows XP SP2 and later versions. One of the main features of this version is MP3 audio encoding of the books for distribution. The first beta version was released on Friday May 16th, 2008 and is still available. It is possible that more RC versions are released before release of version 1.0 in mid/late November, 2008. Since the latest version contains feature improvements and numerous bug fixes, you should use the latest version available.

From version beta 2 onward, Obi needs a DAISY Pipeline backend to perform operations like mp3 encoding and DTB validation. This is a dedicated version of DAISY Pipeline that users will need to install even if they have already installed the full version of the Pipeline. You can download a binary version and access the source code using Subversion.

Instructions for submitting bugg reports

Obi team is looking forward to your bugg reports.
For submitting bugs please go through Instructions for submitting bugg reports.

and If you need help or want to give your opinion on Obi, the best place is the newly opened forum.

Documentation

Other documents

Documents for development team