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Xiph.org Releases Free Fixed-Point Vorbis Decoder
volsung writes "A lot of us want portable music players with Vorbis support, right? Well, Xiph.org has decided to help speed the process by releasing their integerized Vorbis decoder, named "Tremor," under a BSD-like license. Tremor is a Vorbis decoding library written for CPUs without floating point hardware, like most handheld devices use. It was previously a proprietary library--licensed by theKompany for their Sharp Zaurus player, among others--but now it's available for everyone to use. The release page also gives contact information for many of the popular hardware manufacturers. If you want Vorbis support in your hardware, now is the time to send some emails! (Also, please say thanks to the Xiph.org crew with a donation if you can.)"
This is good news, but without a big corp behind it I'm sceptical about whether hardware manufacturers will adopt it. What I'm more worried about now is Xiph themselves though. They've done a great job, and given us this fantastic gift, but now how do they make money? If the library was originally proprietary, then what do they have now?
and I believe OGG will achieved the same popularity and extension that it's other BSD Licensed bretheren enjoy. It's gotta be the freedom of the BSD license that encourages companys to pick up on this stuff, rather than re-inventing the wheel with yet another standard because they don't like a particular clause or so in the license..
I don't care about portables, it's my home system I'm curious about. XMMS I don't so much worry about, but I'm not going to replace hardware. What I have works for me, and if I have to use .mp3 with it, then I will, no matter what license the format has. I suspect a lot of people that have bought and are using MP3-only hardware feel and will act the same way, at least until that hardware gets replaced. mayeb what we need is for new hardware to decode both formats? I could see phasing in Vorbis decoders as being easily doable.
I really wish OGG would have been around (read: taken off) like in 1997...
-B
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that is not just one person's subjective opinion?
.wav, .mp3, and .ogg and see which of the formats differ most from the .wav. This method would also have inherent problems because you are only looking at raw output and not what you may possibly hear. Thus, while one format may "look" better than the other it may sound the same or worse depending on which parts of the music it cut out.
The problem is that music as a whole is subjective. Some people like it with a lot of bass, others like it bright. I'm sure that most people are being honest when they say that they like the sound of ogg over mp3 or vise versa. That is why you really have to do the testing yourself (or you can wait for someone with a similar "ear" for music to test for you).
About the only way I could think of the really test the two formats is to overlay a graph of the outputs of the
Strictly speaking, this isn't 'fixed-point' although it is all integer. It uses primarily fixed point, but in the deep S/N vector paths, it uses integerized movable point in a way that most embedded architectures can do the shifts for free during ALU load (eg, look at the ARM assembly for the shift/multiplies). Have a look at the Vorbis codec spec on xiph.org if you want to know why this is necessary.
Also, this code's been around for a while... we're releasing it for free now as commercial code has a short shelf life. It ran through it's commercial usefulness, and now we want it to be commodity code.
Monty
I really like the idea of Xiph releasing the fixed point decoder, It has the possibility to revolutionize the portable music market.
However, I'm worried, still. Since it is under the BSD liscense nobody could see changes to the code that manufactures might make. Shoddy/out of spec, or smaller subsets of the Ogg spec could be marketed this way (since the manufactures won't have to open the code for everyone to see), and dilution of faith in Ogg could result. As I see it, someone (maybe Xiph themselves) should contract with manufactures to ensure that their products are Ogg v1.0 compliant (with a sticker on the box to prove it).
On the plus side, you get the full implementation of Ogg in your favorite portable. Xiph might also have a nice income making sure products using Ogg are within specification.
On the negative side, products might be slower to deploy, and cost just a tad more.
That said, Xiph rocks. Them's some good folk.
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At last, someone with the right idea. The embedded digital audio space is a volatile new market, with a bunch of relatively young companies and/or young divisions within large companies (which is much the same thing for my purposes here) vying for marketshare. Feature sets end up being defined in two general ways: 1) via feedback about a shipping product (market success or failure, direct user feedback, etc), or 2) marketing gets the idea that customers Must Have This Feature. User feedback can make a difference in this latter model.
Ogg isn't yet big enough on its own to be an automatic target for these electronics marketing divisions. It needs grassroots backing to give it the same boost that MP3's mindshare and Micosoft's market power (WMA) have done for those formats already.
This codebase makes this grassroots effort VERY VIABLE. So write your favorite digital audio portable company (be brief -- you're talking to marketing) and ask for Ogg Vorbis support. FWIW, Apple's design prowess made big waves in this industry. If Apple adds Ogg it, it's very likely that it will become a bullet on everyone else's next product feature list. (Note: the iPod uses an ARM-based processor.)