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iPod May Not Have The Horsepower For Ogg [updated]
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo has an interview with a Rio engineer who speculates that current iPods may not have enough CPU power and/or memory to decode Ogg. He concludes that the Minis might be able to do it, and the next generation iPods will certainly be able to. Of course, just because Apple can doesn't mean it will." Update: 06/06 04:44 GMT by T : csm writes with this rebuttal: "According to Monty from Xiph.org (author of the Tremor codec and OGG itself), it should very well be possible to run Ogg on older generation iPods."
Developer time and support time, mainly.
The more important question: What do they have to gain?
An engineer for a company in direct competition with Apple rips on Apple's hardware. Oh, he's speculating on it.
"Engineer Hugo Fiennes took a break from his day job as a hardware and firmware designer at Rio Audio (maker of the iPod competitor Karma player, among other things)"
That's news?
What's next, someone at Microsoft doesn't like Aqua? Ford engineer says Corvette "not as good as new Mustang"? Fiat engineers doesn't care for Ford Focus?
...a standard that doesn't have a lot of real-world support? I mean, if you go onto one of the p2p systems, you find that everything is still pretty much mp3. So there is some incentive there for Apple to provide mp3 support. Why would they want to promote an alternative standard that they aren't selling, though?
Seems to me that Apple wouldn't benefit much from ogg or flac support. So why bother - besides, the article makes it clear that the processor in the older ipods probably won't even support the decoding of ogg due to cpu limitations.
Barking up the wrong tree here, sadly. Ogg has to get some critical mass before Apple would even consider it.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Adding OGG support would be more than enough to convince me to buy an iPod. I can't really see the downside except for increased strain on the system memory, if what the article claims is true.
On
Well, true, but nobody ever says "MPEG Layer 3 Audio Only File" instead of just calling it "MP3". The tradition of having a three-letter file type extention usually sticks, and since Vorbis files are .ogg files, "Ogg" is the word that sticks.
This article indicates precisely why OGG Vorbis probably isn't a good idea on your ipod or mp3 player... namely, you get 25% LESS battery life. In a non portable, that's fine, but for a portable player with limited battery life... why in the world would anyone choose to get 75% performance with a negligable increase in sound quality (from headphones)?
Yeah, but so are my FLAC files, and my Speex files, I've also got some video (theora) files that are named with .ogg.
I've also got some of each that don't have any file suffixes beginning with dot
By your logic, Apple does not need to support itself because Windows users, in general, have no need for it.
Why don't you try running a successful large company and get a feel for not being a producer, not a consumer?
Seriously, who cares about Vorbis outside the faction of *nix users with +1 Amulets of OSS Awe?
Apple's primary market are the throngs of not-quite-but-almost-technologically-literate end users out there who see gadgets as tools, not lifestyles. Does this afforementioned throng care about Vorbis? No. Should Apple therefore care about Vorbis? No.
Get the fuck over it, already.
The codec is independent of the DRM, and the files generated by Apple's lossless encoder are AAC lossless files with no DRM. Thank you for demonstrating that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Please send a me $1000 dollar check.