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.)"

Comments

No FPU required...

[VValdo]

This was a big stumbling block in getting RIO & iPod type players to support Ogg.

Any idea if this means we can look forward to some Ogg lovin' built-in to consumer products? Timetable?

Thanks Xiph!
W

2 Questions

[Buck2]

I was wondering if someone with more relevant knowledge than I might make an estimation about how much more quickly we might expect to see Ogg support now that this has happened. Are embedded chips without FPU really that much more prevalent, or are they just that much cheaper?

I also wanted to know, on a side note, why the hell portable mp3 players don't come with a damn FM tuner in them. Is it a design/form factor issue? Perceived marketability problem?

I want to use my mp3/ogg player while at the gym ... listen to Howard Stern and then switch to music when it gets dull/commercials. Is this so complicated?

Re:Yeppee!!!

[ShavenYak]

Thank you, Mr. Obvious. We know it's a different format, but the reason (one of the reasons, I should say) it hasn't been supported in hardware players is that the available implementations of the codec required floating-point math.

With that requirement nixed, we might start seeing hardware that supports Ogg as well as MP3 (and WMA... that's been showing up in hardware players lately too).

Processor requirements?

[dschuetz]

Does anyone familar with this implementation have any idea how processor-heavy it is?

I ask because people have played with an earlier floating point implementation on the Rio Receiver, and have found that it wasn't terribly usable. I'm a little short on details, but I think it was too intensive for the low-speed CPU in the receiver.

On the other hand, there has been work to build replacement clients for the Rio Receiver that use FLAC lossless compression, and that apparently works pretty well. So the current thinking is to transcode .ogg to flac at the server level. Or just to rip everything to flac (which requires a whole lot more disk space. :( )

How fast a microprocessor/controller???

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really some good news. Does anyone have an idea on how fast would a microprocessos have to be to decode ogg??? Could I implement it on, say, an 8051??

Hugo

Re:Quality

[Reality Master 101]

The problem is that music as a whole is subjective.

That's why you don't do it subjectively. You use a large number of people, both professional audio people and "normal" people, and you average the results.

About the only way I could think of the really test the two formats is to overlay a graph of the outputs of the .wav, .mp3, and .ogg and see which of the formats differ most from the .wav.

There are known, mathematical ways to test audio quality.

This method would also have inherent problems because you are only looking at raw output and not what you may possibly hear.

That's why you do both measurement tests and listening tests.

Re:Both Licenses are Excellent

[John Whitley]

Excellent points. In this sense, a BSD-like license seems to be more appropriate than GPL/LGPL where the promotion of an open software-based standard is more important than any single codebase that implements that standard.

I'm a firmware engineer in this market, and this definitely lowers the barrier to entry for companies who would previously have had to implement a custom Ogg Vorbis codec. Such a project would have been very expensive to undertake, probably prohibitively so. (both in the development cost and in the lead times to a QA'ed and marketable finished product.)

Re:Isn't this odd.

[volsung]

Actually, no one cares if Fraunhofer (actually Thomson is the one managing the money end) charges for their decoder software since almost no one uses it anyway. On the other hand, people are a little perturbed that you still have to pay Thomson for a patent license even if you write your own decoder.

This is not the case with Vorbis. Xiph.org decided to charge for Tremor in the past, but there never was (and never will be) any restrictions on third-party encoders/decoders. Another person wrote a free integerized Vorbis decoder while Tremor was still proprietary, (though there were some concerns at the time about whether the decoder would produce output equivalent to the floating-point decoder). The Vorbis format is completely open and not hindered by patents, whereas Vorbis software can be licensed however the author wishes.

Which vorbis is faster on Intel?

[iabervon]

Is the original libvorbis faster (due to making productive use of the FPU), or is the new integer math one faster (because floating point is pretty slow in general)? I'd guess that libvorbis is better on Intel and tremor is better on non-Intel x86 (due to the relative strengths of different vendors), but it's hard to say. Has anyone actually benchmarked them? libvorbis is a noticeable load on one of the machiens I use, so it would be worth switching if it would help.