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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."
I mean really, Apple, what do you have to lose?
<jedi> There is something funny here. You laugh. </jedi>
a Beowulf cluster of ipods then?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
It's Vorbis. Not Ogg. Damnit.
Not to be a smartass, but Ogg is just the name of the larger project. The actual audio compression format is called "Vorbis."
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
Apple may offend certain groups, such as Linux Users, by not supporting the Ogg Vorbis system, however the majority of computer users will never even consider using this codec. I submit this for consideration: What Operating system has the largest desktop user market share? Windows, obviously, Apple does not need to support Vorbis because Windows users, in general, have no need for this.
http://www.designchain.com/coverstory.asp?issue=su mmer02
... that article is almost 2 years old now?
Nothing new folks
Sunny Dubey
Apple will probably not support ogg. Ogg has no DRM, and iTunes etc. is based around buying stuff before playing it. I don't own an iPod but I assume I know it plays MP3, I just doubt strongly that apple will add ogg support to it when they probably want to push more people towards iTunes and thus earn more revenue. Ogg doesn't really match up with "revenue", so Apple will probably not support it.
That doesn't mean to say that 3rd party hackers won't find a way to put ogg on an iPod, of course.
in other news, an ipod competitor says ipod not up to snuff. news at 11
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)?
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.
That said, if they build the engine, we will hack it. I look forward to the linux-on-ipod folks dissecting the next gen player and making it play nice with linux as a desktop OS.
[...] 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?
Has /. been taken over by pod people? What happend to you guys? Where would we be today without beowulf cluster jokes and Soviet Russia jokes?
"ipod may not care about ogg's cpu-hungry obscure geek-only format"
Memory isn't a problem. The full of the iPod's memory is directly addressable, and there are even projects (including iPod Linux) which do Ogg (vorbis, really) decoding, however only at low bitrates. The CPU speed is the strangling factor here. If someone wants to do some hard work, they might be able to raise the bitrate a bit, but owing to people generally relying on VBR encodes, it's going to be difficult to fully enable people's libraries, even when they think they have mostly low-bitrate tunes.
Is it just me or is Ogg becoming quite popular - as a movie format? I've seen lots of .ogm files on Suprnova.
Exactly. Mod parent up. Etc.
Why would Apple want to support the Ogg Vorbis format? Call me cynical, and I've said this before, but what's in it for Apple?
Apple support MP3 because it's vital to their business model to get people with MP3 collections on board. Apple supports their own DRM-encumbered format so that they can sell you tunes via iTunes that you can't then share for free.
What's in it for Apple to support a new format that has no DRM? DRM where they want you to go. MP3 is just the bait.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Found this while looking for a shot of the icon:
Cite. Basically what everyone already knows; they're unlikely to support Vorbis because consumers are unlikely to want it. Most of my music is in Ogg, so this is the main reaosn why I'm not interested in the iPod (even though the touchwheel thing is so damn slick), but I'm certainly not representative of the majority.
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
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.
Heaven forbid that a device can't necesarily do something it wasn't designed to do. lordy lordy, i may catch a vapor.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
If you had you would have seen that the discussion was a technical one explaining why the current iPods can't play Ogg Vorbis and speculated that the next generation iPod probably would have the horsepower to do so.
It was hardly a "My Karma is better than your iPod" article.
Face it - It took a Rio engineer to answer the question that most of Slashdot have been asking for years. It's not like Apple have been forthcoming with it.
You'll see that this is a substandard ogg vorbis playback with only fixed point arithmetic. I guess it technically can play OV files, just not correctly decoded with full floating point quality.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Most codecs are designed to simply give the best audio per kilobyte, and recent tests point to (a retuning of) Ogg Vorbis as near the top of the heap. It's certainly achieved what it set out to do: a Free audio codec with fairly wide acceptance that sounds better than mp3/wma under most circumstances.
Vorbis, of course, takes much more CPU muscle to decode than mp3. The difference may be between 0.1% and 1% of my Athlon XP[1], but obviously on an iPod it matters.
Maybe it's time for some group to look at weak-CPU audio codecs? You've got to balance audio-quality-per-bitrate with expense (and power consumption!) of CPU required to decode in realtime.
There's got to be something out there that sounds better than mp3 but can still be decoded with a cheap processor using an amount of power that's not really significant compared to the amplification/transmission circuitry required to get the signal out of the device.
Ideally this could be done on the decode side: write a codec that produces Vorbis-quality results when decoded by a fast CPU, but that could be decoded by a slow processor to produce a good-enough signal. This would solve the current dilemma: do I encode in vorbis to save disk space/get better quality, or mp3 to play stuff on portables?
[1]What a stupid name for a processor.
I currently think that the Rio player is a much ebtter bang for the buck than the iPod. * It's smaller and just as stylish * It's much cheaper * It supports more formats * It doesn't lock you down like Apple does and works on mroe platforms well * It has a longer battery life * etc. What exactly is the reason to buy an iPod if you are not into the whole "online music store" thing?
this guy seems OK with just calling it Ogg
ah, but what does that guy know?
John Klos
Running Amigas for more than a decade.
Why is Ogg Vorbis format so good if it requires such extensive resources to play? Particularly when the most popular digital audio player doesn't support it?
This, to me, is evidence of the problems with Ogg Vorbis, not of problems with the iPod...
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Thank god I bought a Neuros so I don't have to care about this :)
I would just like to point out that 128kbps mp3's are unlistenable on my iRiver IHP-120 + MD33s's due to the annoyance of MP3 artifacts. However, OGG's are good to 96kbps. Itunes AAC is simply out of the question. Paying more for instant lossy encodes? I'm sorry, thats just moronic. and I'm not one of those guys that "just wants one song from an album" because I only give artists money when they have the ability to produce an entirely good album.
That was the original purpose of the MP1 and MP2 formats (MPEG Layers 1 and 2, respectively). They pretty much disappeared after most computers became fast enough to decode MP3 easily. I don't think there's really enough demand for modern low-complexity codecs. After all, LAME-encoded MP3 still sounds better than many "modern" formats, and it's fairly easy to decode. Apple seems to have done a decent job implementing AAC in hardware, and Monty thinks that Vorbis on iPod is quite doable. Since hardware is only getting cheaper and more power-efficient, the effort to develop such a codec probably wouldn't be worth it.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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..
Even though Apple themselves may not support Vorbis audio, ever, the community will implement it if it is possible. Go check out iPodLinux. It has much promise in delivering the things that the Apple stock firmware fails at so miserably.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html
Personally, I'm more interested in letting iTunes support Ogg Vorbis. I'd rather have all my audio files in one place, and I like the iTunes interface more than any other.
Alex.
The sentence in the article about ogg's battery life is very misleading. Yes, it is true that "you get about 25% less battery life" on ogg vs. mp3. However this comparison is done at the same bitrate -- that is to say, 128 kbps ogg will only have 75% the battery life of 128 kbps mp3.
But, what the quote doesn't take into account is that nobody uses oggs and mp3s at the same bitrate. I for one find that ogg can match mp3 in sound quality at about 60% of the bitrate. When you use a smaller bitrate, battery life goes up, because your hard drive activity is less. My firsthand experience is that you can get 15 hrs of continuous ogg playback on the karma, if you use a lower bitrate like 64 or 72 kbps. Also, you will note that even if we hypothetically penalized this real-world measurement of 15 hours by a theoretical 25%, it would still be better battery life than an iPod.
As to your dismissal of headphone sound quality, there are a great many headphones that are good enough to tell the difference. Even without good headphones, 72 kbps mp3 is so bad that anyone who is running out of disk space on their portable can easily justify the switch to vorbis.
I don't share these at all. Because big olde RIAA/MPAA might just come a knocking. I only use them for my personal use.
greg, REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!
you have just been issued a challenge.
geeks are a group that hate to be told they 'can't'.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
okay, i will refute the guy's arguments. i am an embedded systems developer, and often deal with swapping code in from dram/flash to sram for quick execution just such as this. the guy's arguments are, well...
first, the cache is not broken. this is a common design limitation of embedded processors. running code or accessing data from external ram can be VERY slow (1 cycle delay is pretty good). however, his argument is bullshit. the support code for the codec is usually run from dram (like the "open a file, parse a bitstream part"). the core decoder loop, on the other hand, is loaded into sram for fast execution (code and data). if the ogg vorbis decoder can be squeezed into whatever apple has left of the 96kb depends mostly on the efficiency of apple's memory allocation. but i have no doubt that they could do it (they may need to optimize some tables out by computing them at runtime, and other such tricks).
having said that... adding a complex codec into such a system such as the ipod firmware is a major pain in the ass. they may want to enable vorbis support, but it is a large amount of work, and probably hard for apple engineers to justify. if someone could find a good excuse for apple marketing to justify it, i'm sure engineering could figure it out.
Yeah, you know me!
... they're happy with the sound quality. MP3 is huge 'cause it was first and it was free. ACC is huge because it's tied to iTunes and iTunes is the first pay-per-use DRM system. Unless OGG can offer something new, it'll have a hard time gaining support.
I think OGG's major hurdle is that it's trying to solve a problem that most people aren't aware exists. Storage is cheap, and getting cheaper. For the vast majority of listeners
If I do that I am still a subordinate to Apple's format and their non-free software. I'd rather spend my money on a machine that runs on free software and directly supports the formats that let me keep my freedom.
Digital Citizen
I don't think Ogg Vorbis needs an FP unit any more. There was a story here on /. on how someone got the decoder working in integer mode.
Eat the rich.
I'm not just a Maccie troll, I've been reading about the iPod CPU because I'd like to hack with it a bit.
I can't see any reason why the dual ARM7 CPUs Apple fitted the beast with wouldn't be able to play vorbis files. If something has the CPU beefiness to encode MP3s (which the iPod CPU can, there's just no software for the feature) I'm confident that it's good enough to decode vorbis files.
I've played and encoded MP3s on my Quadra 660AV, which ran at a whopping 25MHz (encoding was slow); I'm pretty sure a dualie-ARM made a decade later can handle the vorbis codec, especially when the vendor of the chip Apple uses designed the chip to be a highly extensible media platform.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I just found that the 'tremor' vorbis player for integer-only CPUs (like the ARM used in the iPods) is playing-back media at 80% of realtime on uCLinux iPods, and that's a non-assembler, non-optimized player running on a general-purpose Linux kernel. If you think that a currently neglected OSS player could net a 25% performance boost from being reimplemented in assembler, being tailored for the ARM CPU, and/or running on Apples proprietary iPod OS, raise you hand! ::raises hand enthusiastically::
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
mp3 consortium might charge a fee per user*MB or some such for commercial use of the encoder. Or even if they don't charge it now, they could easily add such fees for new licenses in future. If you think that's counter common sense for them, look at SCO.
Now let's say I offer my own music for free download, and sell some extra tracks to subsidize bandwidth, making it nominally commercial. If I get 100 people downloading 10 songs each daily, this will cost me 30 bucks per day if the license fee is one cent per user*meg. I might just decide it's not worth it, for my free music and only offer ogg streams. Or I might actually serve WMA if ogg is not well supported by portable players and Microsoft offers me a better deal than mp3.
Small segment of users? Perhaps. But so is Apple's market share. They would do well to follow open standards whenever it doesn't cause big problems rather than trying to "lock-in" users using the market dominance they don't have. They actually kind of did with UNIX-based OS.