Slashdot Mirror
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.)"
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..
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
They're contractors. They wrote this on contract for someone, and the contract allowed them to give it away after a while (IIRC). They weren't selling this in the first place. They wrote the floating-point vorbis, and then they were contacted by a company who wanted a fixed-point version and were willing to pay them to write it. Now they're giving away the fixed-point version in addition to the floating-point version, and probably working on other stuff for other people, with a similar deal.
It's like working for a software company. Once you've written something for them, you give it away (to the company); you continue to make money by getting paid to write more software, not being paid royalties or paid for licenses for the stuff you wrote previously.
Does anyone familar with this implementation have any idea how processor-heavy it is?
.oggs take up less space - it's a win-win situation.)
Using tkcPlayer on my Sharp Zaurus (which uses this library,) Ogg Vorbis playback takes up less CPU than mp3 playback (and the
Please tell Apple you want Ogg Vorbis support in the iPod.
The Intel StrongARM chip is pretty popular in embedded devices, including the Zaurus, iPod and other PDAs and portable music players. While the chips have an excellent power consumption vs performance and price ratio, it lacks a hardware FPU.
I'm not sure companies choose the StrongARM because it's cheaper than chips with a FPU. More likely, they choose it because it is supported by GCC, Linux, Windows CE and hundreds of commercial tools. It is low power, widely deployed, and relatively powerful for a low power chip. And having Intel behind it doesn't hurt. In short, it is a very low risk platform with significant advantages and a few minor disadvantages (no FPU).
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
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
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.
The mail archives didn't disappear; they were never there. I made a permissions error in the archive spool after fixing a log rotation bug :-( None of May was logged.
The previous non-Xiph fixed-point decoder releases are derived from a flawed 'good enough for now' port of Vorbis to the HipZip originally done by iObjects/Fullplay. This port was a quick integerization of beta 3 done in late 2000 and has signal depth problems. It does not decode later-than-beta-4 files. Even if updated to full 1.0, it will still have dynamic range problems when playing 1.0 and later bitstreams.
Tremor was originally done as a report to ARM at the request of Fullplay after determining that starting from scratch was easier than repairing the existing beta-3-derived code. Fullplay opted not to purchase the new port, and eventually released their own beta-3 port under GPL on SourceForge. Those who then derived their own versions from the SourceForge project were generally aware that this was an incomplete 'good enough for now' version and that the code would eventually hit bitstreams that it couldn't play well or at all.
Now that Tremor is BSD, there's no reason to keep using derivations of this old beta-3 port.
Nothing strange about it. You can go back to chasing government UFO conspiracies now....
Monty
The original target for Tremor was a 74MHz Cirrus Maverick (ARM 7 TDMI core).
Monty