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iPod May Not Have The Horsepower For Ogg [updated]

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the maybe-it's-a-lack-of-a-gumption-bit dept.

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."

6 of 399 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  2. Exactly why would Apple add in... by HBI · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.
  3. Re:The name is wrong by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Why OGG? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)?

    1. Re:Why OGG? by mcgroarty · · Score: 5, Insightful
      why in the world would anyone choose to get 75% performance with a negligable increase in sound quality (from headphones)?
      It's not really a linear scale from worse to better. Setting aside the dogmatic choices a lot of the free software people make, the compression artifacts and failures of the MPEG layer 3 and vorbis CODECs is fairly different.

      Even at higher bitrates, mp3 (or its encoders) tend to have a lot of difficulty producing tuned white noise, especially in harmony with better-formed sounds. A breathy voice or a flute can be murder to reproduce. There's also a kind of "glistening" that happens when it tries to represent overtones near the high end of the encoding frequency.

      On the other hand, vorbis seems to more often fail with balances of the frequency range, making some components of sounds louder and others softer than the original, especially with the earlier encoders. Sometimes this merely gives you a too-tuned and prounounced bass range while bands in higher frequencies become too soft. At other times, more complex instruments can lose their character altogether. Steel guitar strings lose the harsher-defined overtones and sound more like nylon, for example.

      Personal preference determines which kind of loss people will choose. Some even pick specific formats to best represent specific styles of music.

  5. *Why?* by adun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.