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Product on Alibaba... description includes CODEC

https://www.alibaba.com/produc...

Even the Datasheet says it's a CODEC

http://www.vlsi.fi/fileadmin/d...

There are in fact some Ogg Vorbis capable hardware decoders available. You're right though that no one is going to pick one of those just because it supports Vorbis. They might pick it for other reasons and choose to support Vorbis because it's easy to do and adds a small additional differentiator between themselves and their competitors, but that's just a side effect.

iRiver's players support ogg vorbis

From what I understand, the lack of Ogg support on many players stems less from commercial or legal concerns (patent issues vis a vis Fraunhofer notwithstanding) than from technical issues. Ogg needs more juice to decode, which means needing stronger processors, better means of heat dissipation, and a necessary hit on battery performance. Not that it can't be done, but it requires more expensive components and shorter battery lives.

Because it's currently very expensive (or impossible?) to get chip decoders for OGG Vorbis, because of lack of demand.

VLSI offers their VS1000 Ogg Vorbis decoder (with built in USB and flash interface) for $4 each, quantity 500. No doubt much less in higher quantities. You can get onesies for less than $10 from SparkFun.

Ogg Vorbis is actually a pretty popular encoding for low end embedded devices because there's no licensing involved.

The real problem is with digital music players that also want to be able to play WMA files (which is what Windows Media Player will helpfully rip your CDs to). I suspect that Microsoft leans on the manufacturers a little to make the firmware rather non-cooperative with Ogg, in return for WMA licensing. (This is the case with eg. Samsung YP-T9; the US/Canada firmware only wants to load via MTP, and the provided software doesn't recognize .ogg although the player will play Ogg Vorbis files if they have an .mp3 extension. Reflashing the firmware to the international version lets it appear as a USB storage device and load .ogg files.)

While not prevalent in the industry yet, but this chip is a start.

They don't seem to send free samples to just people, but I got some samples sent to my university...
They do sell the chips in small quantities, but it's expensive. There are a couple of webshops that
sell some of their chips at a little bit better price, though.

About the license fee: the Vorbis chip (VS1000) is not yet listed on the price list, I guess it's so new.
But all those chips that are listed have the MP3 capability so it makes sense that for THOSE chips
the MP3 license is payed. In the VS1000 product page it says it's license-free and in the datasheet it says:

"The default player application only decodes Ogg Vorbis files, but it can be extended to allow some simple
codecs, like a WAV decoder."

> It would be nice though to see a full feature set for what's on that price list to see which ones
> (if not all) do have the dreaded Thompson Tax.

That's not hard to find from their website, it's at http://www.vlsi.fi/products/icprod.shtml
and all others than the VS1000 support MP3.

This chip seems different than their previous chips, I've controlled VS1011 with a microcontroller, but
this VS1000 seems to be more like a stand-alone chip, so I guess you need to either use the "default
player application" or learn to code for their DSP. They do have a C compiler for their DSP at their
web site (www.vlsi.fi) but I wonder if they will release a more detailed spec for application development.
The compiler seems to be from 2003 so there aren't any infos about the new chips in the package...

I saw the chip, and contemplated using it in a project once. The problem with the VLSI Solution Oy chips is that they can only really be used in very well controlled embedded sound applications (doll saying "Hi"). They can't be used in a portable music player. Whereas most chips will continue to work after seeing bad data, the VLSI Solution Oy chips will crash hard. Toggling the reset pin won't even help, in some cases. You need to cut power, wait, and bring power back. I'm not kidding; this is a universal problem with their chips: http://www.vlsi.fi/vs1001/faq/faq.shtml#item9

I have no idea why they don't fix this bug -- it seems completely incompetent.

But how well can people ABX the presence vs. absence of power in those octaves? And would simple noise shaping a la PlusV suffice? Even so, the article is about portable consumer stereo equipment, and the vast majority of such equipment cannot reproduce ultrasonic frequencies.

I would like to bring to your attention the VS1053 chip from VLSI. Download the datasheet here: http://www.vlsi.fi/download/download.shtml While the spec is preliminary, the chip is already on the way. I suppose there are more of them on the market already.

I think this whole upgrade your MP3 player to OGG just by changing the firmware is a bit bogus. If the MP3 is based on a hardware solution (e.g the VS1001 ) then there's no way that a firmware change can make OGG work.