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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."
http://www.designchain.com/coverstory.asp?issue=su mmer02
... that article is almost 2 years old now?
Nothing new folks
Sunny Dubey
i do agree with you though, there are just not enough people using ogg for apple to care.
I thought that the Linux on iPod project managed to get Ogg playback working ?
Sure - it may not be at 100 percent realtime, but I bet Apple engineers (vs the noble folks who had to reverse engineer the iPod) could manage.
[...] This means that running code that doesn't fit in the internal 96kbyte SRAM of the player is very inefficient, both in terms of CPU cycles and power. MP3 and AAC just about squeeze into the internal memory (one at a time, obviously!), but anything that didn't would result in a big power hit - my guess is 30-40%+.
Surely only code in external RAM would incur this hit. Vorbis decoders spend most of their time doing discrete cosine transforms, which would easily fit into 96K. As would a lot of other performance-critical routines, I'd imagine. So we're talking about a 40% hit on 5% of execution time, which seems pretty trivial, right? Or am I missing something?
Is it just me or is Ogg becoming quite popular - as a movie format? I've seen lots of .ogm files on Suprnova.
iPod support for Vorbis would be cool.
What I would truly love would be iPod support for Ogg Speex. I download quite a few audio lectures/interviews, and if the iPod supported Speex, I'd buy one ASAP and go on a campaign to get a few organizations I deal with to put their stuff out in Speex, not just mp3 and wma. For that matter, I'd love to be able to encode my audio books in Speex and have then on the go.
Forget the ipod, the Rio Karma is wonderful from a GNU/Linux users perspective!
It plays all my ogg files without problems (a friends iriver could only handle lower bitrate ogg files).
I could upload music to it quickly and easily from my linux desktop using their java gui and connecting to the rio karma across my lan.
As I use this player to drive my car speakers (I only have an amp, no head unit), it was very important that the interface be user friendly. This is where I had seen the ipod shine, and where I was doubtful about getting the rio karma (as I knew no owners of one and had not seen a showroom model). However I (and several passengers) found the rio karma interface to be as friendly, if not more so, than the ipod.
The rio karma was cheaper than the ipod, has more features, and is more cross platform. I have no regrets and strongly recomend it to music fans.
donfede
Just because the ipod may have 32MB of buffer for data, doesn't mean it could decode Ogg Vorbis files. As the engineer states in the article, the PP5002 has a relatively small cache, with a relatively expensive penalty if the instruction is not found in the cache but rather in the permanent memory(ROM) of the ipod. Wheter or not the Ogg codec can be optimized to fit in the cache is a different story, and definitely something to be explored before claiming that the gen1-3 iPod's can't handle the job.
Technical details aside, this guy works for a competing business, and would bad mouth it regardless. Its like posting a story that Rush Limbaugh doesn't like John Kerry- big surprise.
John Klos
Running Amigas for more than a decade.
Let us assume that it really is a CPU horsepower vs. file size vs. sound quality issue.
Looking at two extremes:
Realaudio files used to play justfine, Back In The Day, on a slowish 486. It sounded like shit, but it worked fine. Of course, this same 486 was incapable of playing MP3s. For that, you generally needed a Pentium, and preferably a fast(ish) one.
And of course, these days, it just doesn't matter. MP3 playing consumes so little CPU time that nobody gives a thought to it running in the background. In other words, the hardware finally caught up (some time ago, really).
Fast forward, and things are the same, only portable. MP3 files play justfine, on just about everything. My old Riovolt SP-250, after a lot of effort from the Xiph folks and iRiver, is able to play some Vorbis without a hiccup.
Newer units play all Vorbis justfine, though. They use even less power doing it, and cost less than my SP-250 did. In other words, the hardware is already caught up.
Sufficient CPU power to play such new-ish formats as Vorbis will eventually creep into more products as the cost of CPU power decreases (eg. Moore's Law).
I'd like to forecast that it'll be easier, cheaper, faster, and better to simply wait for CPU power to catch up across the board, than to go ahead and invent a scalable codec. By the time you're done making the thing, no matter how brilliant it is, CPUs and DSPs will have advanced the price/performance ratio sufficiently that your efforts will fade into obscurity, just like intel's indeo video format[1] of more than a decade ago.
Meanwhile, any foolish manufacturers or software developers who jumped on your scalable codec-bandwagon will watch their efforts fizzle and die, as people regroup to support formats that Don't Suck, like our existing OGG Vorbis.
That said, if you must tinker with software, do feel free to help improve Vorbis. Make it faster, make it smaller. Make it shit golden eggs, whatever. But don't reinvent the wheel without first examining where the rest of the world will be by the time you get done.
[1]: indeo was created as a high-ish quality, high-bitrate video format, designed to be encoded once and played anywhere. Framerate and quality would drop on low-end devices, while things would be more pristine on faster machines, all from the same source file. It died a quiet death when inevitable increases CPU speed made it a non-issue. Subsequently, better and more-intensive codecs like MPEG1 took over. The near-universal playability, and use, of the previously-hideously-intensive DivX family of codecs drive this point home.
Kid-proof tablet..