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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 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
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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?
... listen to Howard Stern and then switch to music when it gets dull/commercials. Is this so complicated?
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
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
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..
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).
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Actually, Emmett says they were cool with it. None of the people who had licensed the code earlier have to pay any money from this point on, so they are pretty happy, actually.
By "they still haven't released a complete specification for the file format, or the audio format", I assume you meant, "Back when Vorbis hit 1.0, I read the full specification and stopped spreading FUD", right?
Does anyone familar with this implementation have any idea how processor-heavy it is?
.ogg to flac at the server level. Or just to rip everything to flac (which requires a whole lot more disk space. :( )
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
Actually not at all. We didn't pay a big licensing fee for Tremor and this came about before we paid any royalties, so it works out just fine for us. We love Xiph and Ogg Vorbis and have lots more stuff coming along to continue working with them. We have a nice easy to use and multi-platform (later this week) ripper for Ogg Vorbis called tkcOggRipper which you can check out at www.thekompany.com/projects/tkcoggripper. We also have an entirely ogg based internet radio station coming online shortly at www.progrock.com - we ripped about 350 CD's using tkcOggRipper, and we have even more fun stuff ahead.
. com
Rock on Xiph and may Ogg Vorbis rule the day!
Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany
I know that everyone is down on the BSD and up on the GPL, but we owe a tremendous amount to the BSD license.. Companys (like microsoft) took up stuff like the TCP/IP stack, BIND, etc..
The BSD License is an excellent license for some things, just as the GPL is an excellent license for other things.
OggVorbis is one area where the BSD License makes perfect sense, namely, in an effort to get a published, open format implimented as widely as possible.
The GPL is an ideal license for persons and companies that wish to make their code available and participate in a public commons, without unconditionally handing their crown jewels over to a competitor. Indeed, there are many commercially written programs whose source code likely wouldn't have been released at all, or would have been released only under really onerous restrictions, such as Microsoft's so-called open license, Sun's community license, or something along those lines.
Both licenses are excellent. Both philosophies are a positive contribution to the intellectual wealth of humankind, and both have their place. Which one is most applicable to a given set of circumstances depends largely upon those circumstances and the goals in mind.
In this case, the goal is to spread the use of Ogg Vorbis as far and wide as possible, for which the BSD license is ideal. Indeed, even the FSF, which normally has strong reservations with regard to the BSD license, has endorsed the release of OggVorbis under the BSD license.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Please tell Apple you want Ogg Vorbis support in the iPod.
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
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
They're not always entirely hardware. Often a "MP3 chip" is nothing more than a DSP processor with onboard ROM. Its cheaper todo it that way and easier to maintain [fixing bugs means recompile the code not rebuild the device]
However that being said some MP3 players actually have DSP processors and the codecs in RAM [or flash of some sort]. The RIO-Volt IIRC has that functionality. Which means adding Vorbis support is not entirely out of the question.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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
Because writing a fixed-point decoder without the spec (which only came out recently) is pretty difficult.
> Uh, no, seeing is that I haven't heard of Vorbis until now.
Mmm, this begs one of a few responses:
1) "Gee, you don't care. That's nice. You must be talking to hear yourself talk, then."
2) "Really? I'll tell you what Ogg is if you explain to me why I was supposed to get all excited about Jessica Simpson."
3) "[rolls eyes] Not need respond to rhetorical question, Grog."
4) "Quick! There's another parade to rain on over there! Hurry up, you'll miss it!"
Monty
"All in good fun until someone loses an eye. Then we're talking serious fun."
Wait... let me get this straight. You read /., and you haven't heard of Vorbis?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Start here: Hydrogen Audio
No, that's not us (Although we like them as they're likely the least bullshit-laden codec comparison and development bulletin board out there. These guys were *very* harsh about Vorbis's quality the first few years. That feedback was invaluable for making the codec as good as it is today.)
c't has also run tests including Vorbis, and will have a big test run on several thousand listeners to offer here sometime soon. It's basically a much larger version of the tests ff123 has run on Hydrogen Audio. We're not privy to any of the current results, but I expect we'll do just fine ;-)
As for 'cranking it out', Ogg development started in 1993.
Monty
There are known, mathematical ways to test audio quality.
s/quality/fidelity/
You can measure how accurately an algorithm reproduces a given input signal, but there is no objective mathematical way to measure the quality of the audio, eg, whether the signal is any good in the first place.
Other than that, you're correct -- a thorough evaluation of an audio algorithm's worth will include both objective (waveform analysis) and subjective (humans listening) testing.
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.
On May 04, Nicolas Pitre released a free (GPL) fixed point vorbis decoder and announced it on Vorbis Developement list.
But this important contribution was kept in silence. Even all posts from May 2002 had mysteriously dissapeared from Vorbis-dev archive.
Fortunately a copy of Nicolas announcement could be find here.
Now Xiph.org anounces that its fixed-point implementation is available for free under BSD style license.
This seems very strange to me.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
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.
The original target for Tremor was a 74MHz Cirrus Maverick (ARM 7 TDMI core).
Monty