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Ogg/Vorbis on Palm OS
loshwomp writes "We have built an audio player for Palm OS, and a public beta is available now. The beta includes support for Ogg/Vorbis audio, and a future beta will include plug-ins for more formats, as well as the plug-in SDK itself."
if your palm uses smartmedia or compact flash cards than you can store up to a gig of music depending on how much money your willing to shell out. more info here
The Blade Itself
but it's still good to see it on the palm as well.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
The main stumbling block to Vorbis implementations was that the reference decoder was floating point intensive, whereas MPEG decoding can be done with mostly integers. However, there's now the "Tremor" reference decoder which uses purely integer math.
It's not really that difficult of a format. The only real oddity is that you have to buffer in the first few Ogg pages quickly in order to set up the codebook and other Vorbis headers, whereas MPEG uses discrete frames; but, once you've got the headers parsed, Vorbis is a relatively straightforward format.
There are two answers to your question. First, the new Palm OS v5 was designed to run on much more powerfull processors. Second, there was a problem for a while with ogg not having a integer only decoder algo. Lots of pdas aren't equipped with a floating point unit, so that was a real show stopper. Well, not anymore, since the integer version of the decoder is now also available with an open license.
Let's clear up some things to stop the inundation of amazingly stupid posts. This software DOES NOT work on Palm's running OS 4 or below. It only runs on the new Tungsten T, which uses a 200Mhz ARM processor, and runs OS 5.0. The Tungsten T also includes expansion for memory cards, and has a headphone jack, making it quite useful for music. In fact, Palm is expected to release some sort of MP3 player for the device, but did not include one because it was not something "the target audience wanted."
So please no more of the "wow, decoding music with a 33Mhz processor would never work," "wow, I can hold two songs in my 8MB of RAM," etc., etc. comments. You are right, the old Palms WILL NEVER play music files; it is simply infeasible.
Three fair questions. Answers, respectively, are "a small collection of Palm OS and Vorbis enthusiasts", "yes", and "by submitting it here".
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