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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."
What is the license? Where is the source code? This isn't freshmeat.net so I hope there's something more significant than just a free ad for proprietary software.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
You're advertising this on Slashdot as a Palm OS app, but admit that it only runs currently on the Tungsten T. Your website only has one page, with no detail as to whether your product is open source or not. I can't find info about you or your application anywhere, even at your personal site, where you host your "free ogeLib Palm OS library". Who are you, is this for real, and how did you get it posted on the main page of Slashdot?
As for my fellow readers, has anyone actually downloaded and run this app?
If you'd actually folow the link and read the page, you'd see that the application is made for the Tungsten T and reads the files off expansion cards. So it will run on the Tungsten (which has 16MB of RAM), read ogg files off SD expansion cards (which come in sizes up to 128MB), and you can use headphones.
Does this
>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.
Actually, I'm not so convinced.
The older Palms had shitty sound hardware, but it is possible to play at least WAV files on them. The quality sucks major, but it works nevertheless.
Disk space is also not a problem. Standard Vorbis will get down to 8kbps, which put quite a bit of files in 8M. I have written prototypes of new Vorbis encoders that will go down to 4kbps mono with pretty acceptable quality. This gets you a full album in 2M. Three albums at least on a 8M Palm.
The big issue is the CPU. Old Palms have a 33Mhz 68k processor. All that I have seen could be overclocked without risk to at least 45Mhz, and since we're pushing the limits of the hardware anyway, let that make us our target.
The question is if a 45Mhz 68k can decode a 6-8khz sample rate mono Vorbis 1.0 file. We're not looking for full Vorbis 1.0 compatibility remember, we just want to play those files, which have significantly less hardware demands than for example an 128k stereo 44khz Ogg. Since we're not going to need 16bits output either, you can make compromises in the decoder trading quality for speed. I have no idea if it is possible to decode Vorbis in this conditions, but I certainly don't think the answer is an 'obviously not' and I am currently investigating it.
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GCP
palm doesn't have an "internal" file system. everything is stored as a resource or record database. the data chunk is limited to 64k. there are API's available that allow filestreaming, which, pretty much do 'internal management' of your data in 4k record chunks :) a good programmer would support filestreaming .pdb files - i have written a number of utilities to convert from a normal file -> .pdb filestreaming.