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Ogg/Vorbis on Palm OS

Posted by michael on from the music-on-the-go dept.

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."

11 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. processor intensive? by absurdhero · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Are Palms high performance or has the OGG/Vorbis decoder gotten a lot less processor intensive, I wonder?

    1. Re:processor intensive? by millette · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Re:um. by p00kiethebear · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. oh great... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now I can listen to AC/DC on my PalmOS device's crappy little speaker...

    Just what I wanted...

  4. I can't resist saying... by Kunta+Kinte · · Score: 5, Informative
    that zaurus has had this for a while now ( also here ).

    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
  5. Re:If it runs on a Palm... by Uller-RM · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Okay, who are you really? by Tsar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Okay, who are you really? by loshwomp · · Score: 5, Informative
      Who are you, is this for real, and how did you get it posted on the main page of Slashdot?

      Three fair questions. Answers, respectively, are "a small collection of Palm OS and Vorbis enthusiasts", "yes", and "by submitting it here".

      Free bonus information:

      • No, it's not open source, although some of the as-yet-unreleased plug-ins will be
      • The app itself is free as in beer (donations welcome, but let's wait until we're past beta first, if that's okay)
      • It only runs on the Tungsten at the moment because it requires ARM hardware, and thus far Sony hasn't provided the audio API for the new NX Clies
  7. Please, enough already: Check out the link! by 0ptimus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Please, enough already: Check out the link! by Skuto · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >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.

      --
      GCP

  8. Re:Lets see here by IHateEverybody · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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