Ogg Vorbis decoder chip a reality

LinuxGeek writes "The design is finished and announced for a low power Ogg Vorbis decoder. Hopefully we will see portable players very soon now."

Comments

Umm

[stratjakt]

Seems to me the chip is not a reality.

A design for it is.

Which is merely one step past "idea".

By now I know i dont have first post, but shout outs to whoever does.

will it make survive?

[Mr2cents]

The cost of chips depends mainly on the number of them you produce, so won't the mp3 players be much cheaper? I personally use ogg, but mp3 is still much much more popular. I know people (ordinary computer users) who haven't even heard of ogg! (don't wory, I 'fixed' it ;))

Re:About time, but nothing special

[deman1985]

It may not be in hard silicon yet, but it's a working design nonetheless. It can only be improved from here by using design-specific hardware.

FPGA Version?

[tunabomber]

Does anyone know whether there are music players equipped with Field Programmable Gate Arrays to allow new codecs to be programmed in as technology advances? That would really be nice if they made a lightweight player with a generic FPGA in it so you could burn whatever codecs you want into it without needing a microprocessor and an EEPROM chip.

Re:FPGA Version?

[stonecypher]

Not really. IBM's PPC PDA design, for example, has an FPGA for misc. functions like modems.

Yah, they also used to do that with their PCMCIA modems. Wave something or another, too lazy to check. That's a little different: IBM was producing those for a vareity of devices, all being sold at IBM scale, all fairly tiny devices. The part of the modem that's actually an FPGA is relatively small: it's just the encoder, the decoder, the modulator and the demodulator. The rest is still IC. That way, they can pick up new V standards without relying on software running on a general purpose CPU from flash.

On the other hand, this guy is talking about taking on whole new audio codecs. Modems don't change a bunch: they're tied to an analog carrier with certain characteristics that aren't expected to change. (That's why Big Blue stopped this tactic for a while - when we switched to 56k, we were really just taking a direct line to the multiplexer at the telco digitally, instead of having a d->a converter in the way like traditional; this implied a lot of new characteristics, and the old whateverwave modems couldn't be upgraded to match.)

A new audio codec could be tremendously larger and/or more complex than an older one. Granted, this is also a problem for GP CPUs; they're finite speed, and what's good enough for something like MP3 can't handle something like VQF; I expect this isn't a fluke. Later codecs will need more horsepower too. But the kind of near-identical situations you get with modems are seriously smaller problems than switching audio decompressors at the scale that these hashing monstrosities work.

I don't mean to sound like a troll, but...

[fobbman]

...why would Joe User consider buying an Ogg portable player? I just pulled up my Netjuke and it says that I have 189 mp3-encoded albums in there, encoded that way because I have a portable mp3 player. I sure don't want to go through the bother of re-encoding my music. Why would any user want to go through the bother of a) re-encoding all of their CDs in Ogg format when they won't notice the difference with their crappy Walkman headphones, or b) re-pirating all of those songs that they like in Ogg format (as if they would find them)?

I just don't see a compelling reason for the portable music crowd to want to do this, and I don't think that there are enough ./ fanatics to make it financially viable for a company to produce.

Re:Is it needed?

[William Tanksley]

I'm ambivalent. On the one hand I don't want to slag off the guy who put so much work into Ogg. On the other hand, I don't support the idea behind Ogg at all. Ogg was created to protect us against the evil of software patents, but in doing so, it legitimizes that same evil. I would rather not acknowledge it at all: I'd rather see it die through a massive failure of enforcement (after all, in retrospect, what was all the brouhaha over the GIF patent good for?).

You're a little wrong here -- Ogg wasn't created to fight software patents; it was created to provide an unencumbered multimedia format. If you want to use that sort of thing, Ogg is your choice. It turns out that Ogg Vorbis is also very good, so it's a good choice even if you're fully willing to use encumbered formats.

But your purpose is different; Ogg isn't for you. You want to do civil disobedience to protest a bad law. I'm all for you doing that, even though I can't join you (I'm not capable of infringing on this patent even if I wanted to), but you need one friendly warning: the result that all civil disobedience users need to expect and prepare for is punishment according to the terms of the law. I'm not saying you're *not* expecting that, but it's certainly not what you're advocating when you say that nobody should worry about MP3 licensing terms. No, only those who are willing and prepared to pay the price should set out to battle.

But other than that -- go for it. I'll keep using and developing free alternatives where I can, since I don't want to take something that's not offered freely.

-Billy

Re:Wow, very low power!

[.com b4 .storm]

Now the question is will the Apple Music Store start offering OGG format files? Maybe an iPod update?

Not to be rude, but... Why the hell would Apple do that? As far as the Music Store is concerned, it will not happen - Apple's AAC format works just fine, and it has the lite DRM that makes the RIAA happy while not pissing off customers. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And they won't.

Then there is the fact that Apple primarily targets the 'average' computer user, which is not you and me. Joe iPod Owner does not know or care about OGG, and he has no reason to. His 2GB collection of MP3s and his fledgling assortment of iTunes AAC files serve his needs. Since he does not care, there's little reason for Apple to.