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Apple's iPod Chip Supports WMA?
John writes "Chip manufacturer Portal Player in Santa Clara builds the embedded PP5002 chip in Apple's iPod (allowing the playing of AAC and MP3). It has emerged that the chip firmware, by default, allows the playing of WMA. However, for some reason this is locked by Apple."
LMFAO!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Ya, I can't imagine why they'd like to prevent the proliferation of a competing company's formats. Very strange...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
This is the same chip used by other MP3 players other than the iPod, which begs the question, why aren't more people supporting AAC on their players. >50% market share should be justification enough, nevermind the subjective debate of which format has higher quality.
The thing is, that chip sounds like it's a specialized decoder for 2-3 music file formats. It's not a general-purpose comuting chip, which would be required for interpreting OGG. The extra games are probably handled by a separate processor that handles the playlist management software.
why would it be active? Wouldn't Apple have to pay for those rights to use it?
In addition there is also a royalty involved. For WMA this is true but for AAC you pay only an upfront fee ($15000) but no royalties. That might be a reason not to support WMA by default in the iPod!?
Wait a minute... I don't own an iPod! Or any .WMA files! GAAAH!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
This isn't as simple as Apple not flipping the iPod WMA bit just to flip off Microsoft,
although that's the implication in the article.
Well yeah, the chip supports it. but that's just a small part of the total system.
Apple would also have to integrate WMA into iTunes for Mac and Windows.
To really do it right, it might be added at a lower level into Mac OS X as well.
That now ties Apple into paying M$ royalties on iTunes and iPod, perhaps even
OS X, and having to continually disclose to M$ on the number of units sold and to who.
I think that Apple would want to avoid any further entanglements with M$ if they
can be avoided. They know well what happens when you dance with the devil.
Apple has probably suffered more from Microsoft's abusive practices than anyone.
And one more thing... Drop the constant whining about OGG. Please.
This is no different than Microsoft wanting to push their own formats above all others.
From a November 1997 Wired article:
"...January 1984 launch, Gates shifted gears and decided to put Excel onto the Mac first. "We bet on the Macintosh, hoping Windows would come in sooner rather than later," Raikes remembers.
It was a big wager, indeed. Gates committed fully one-third of Microsoft's programming resources to the Macintosh, putting Jeff Harbers in charge of the project. "We were complete Mac fanatics," remembers Harbers....
"I remember having a meeting with Ballmer and the [Microsoft] Mac team," Gates says. "We were all saying, 'Jesus, you know, Apple may not do this well.' And Ballmer said, 'Well, we can help them. But we have to assume they're staying awake at night worrying about these same things.'"
Sorry, wrong, it is a general purpose chipset. See:
http://www.amd.com/de-de/FlashMemory/FlashApplicat ions/0,,37_1736_6577_8011,00.html
Which states:
The PP5002 SuperIntegration(TM) System-On-Chip features dual ARM7TDMI (R) microprocessors.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
Here is the PP5002 spec: http://www.portalplayer.com/products/documents/500 2_brief_0108_Public.pdf
WMA is indeed supported.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
well said. with the worst DRM ever implemented in a downloadable audio file, I just don't see any advantages to WMA, including sound quality. AAC sounds SOO much better because Dolby Labs actually know what they're doing.
>>> "However, for some reason this is locked by Apple."
>> How about because they didn't pay for it?
> Because it's a terrible file format compared to MP3, and MP3 is already the standard?
And this, boys and girls, is why you should read the comments twice before replying to them.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
> It was indeed a bailout. It was termed so inside the tech world, and also in the "secular" business press at the time. Do you want
> some of the many many examples?
And it is well documented that one of the reasons that everybody thought it was a bailout was because nobody was allowed to mention the real reason that it happened. Which was because Apple discovered that MS had stolen the source code for QuickTime and inserted it whole-cloth into their competing product. Lawsuit, settlement, and large investment.
Of course, you've heard all of this before and chosen to ignore it all, so I'm sure I can't convince you of anything. But I worked at Apple for a while, and know a couple of the people who were involved in the trial.
Basically, Apple got some money when it needed it (although they did still have billions in cash and assets, the stock purchase definitely helped), and Microsoft got to look like a 'good company' at a time it needed it. A win-win settlement.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I just don't see any advantages to WMA, including sound quality. AAC sounds SOO much better because Dolby Labs actually know what they're doing.
;-) Despite all that, I wouldn't doubt that Dolby still knows quite a bit more about what they're doing.
:-)
In all fairness, M$ does spend plenty of money on non-software R&D, including the salaries of very smart engineers who know how to design audio codecs. I live in the Seattle area, and one of my family members is involved with the local section of the AES (Audio Engineering Society). They had an all-day seminar recently about "Sampling, Conversion, and the Limits of Hearing" (I unfortunately didn't get to attend), and one of the speakers was an engineer at Microsoft. His bio says he's only been there for a little over a year, so he probably didn't influence the current WMA codec(s) much. And maybe they hired him to help improve the WMA codecs, because they didn't know what they were doing when they did the last ones. But MS must have more of a clue than you give them credit for. BTW, I have no personal opinion about WMA quality because I've never encountered it. I do, however, have an opinion about its DRM scheme...
Microsoft may be evil, but they do spend money on that kind of research and they do know what they're doing, at least in this area and at least since this guy was hired. Perhaps that's because Gates most likely leaves this guy and his colleagues alone--he's not dictating codec design like he dictates Windows' design.
If you are so inclined, you can probably find the info about this presenter and the seminar using Google, but I won't link to it (don't want to kill their probably-low-capacity server, among other reasons). Sorry.
Not only is it a general purpose chip, but the iPod linux folk have successfully installed linux on it and then successfully decoded ogg files in real time. I can't even fathom why Apple hasn't included ogg for their players, the processor can handle it.
Help I'm a rock.
Coupla years ago, I helped write the microprocessor reference manuals for the PP5002C.
There's nothing WMA-specific about the chip. It's (as the above poster noted) basically two ARM7 cores, cache, and some I/O logic that makes it especially well-suited to low-power devices.
Portal Player did not design the PP5002C for the iPod; it is equally well at home playing AIFF, mp3, AAC, whatever - another WMA-compatible player could as easily use the PP5002 as a CPU - but an extremely capable little media CPU is all that it is - there's nothing WMA specific about the PP5002.
These people have thousands of songs in WMA, and enjoy it because the compression size is about one half of mp3. Would e you have them convert all those files (not to mention loss more quality in the process, as they'd be going from lossy to lossy) and take up way more hard drive space? Well, they won't. Instead they're going to buy one of the dozens of wma/mp3 players out there. Most every mp3 player does wma nowadays except the iPod. Any other ideas, smart ass?
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Because the world would be a better place if people would store all their computer files in open formats that do not involve patents and licensing.
Well that's hardly a good reason to switch to OGG.
If you want to switch to OGG, fine go ahead, but expecting other people to switch because of moral reasons is silly.
It's only recently that OGG has stablized the format anyway. I was encoding mp3s back in 1996 when OGG was no where near done.