iPod May Not Have The Horsepower For Ogg [updated] 399
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."
Re:No call for...... (Score:0, Interesting)
This has always been known ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing new folks
Sunny Dubey
Apple will not (Score:2, Interesting)
That doesn't mean to say that 3rd party hackers won't find a way to put ogg on an iPod, of course.
Re:Exactly why would Apple add in... (Score:5, Interesting)
i do agree with you though, there are just not enough people using ogg for apple to care.
Can't Linux on iPod Do This? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
I would be impressed, but surprised (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Technical nitpicking (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:My Opinion (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why OGG? (Score:2, Interesting)
For one thing my entire CD collection is now in OGG format on my main machine and I'm not about to re-encode for the benefit of Apple's decision to add yet another music format. So, until OGG is an option I'm not interested in an iPod. With it, on the other hand, I can live with 25% less battery life.
TWW
Critical mass (Score:5, Interesting)
Ogg (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Rio Karma is WONDERFUL (from a GNU/Linux user) (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Rio Karma (Score:2, Interesting)
Try this at home: (Score:1, Interesting)
5951
ac@eggdrop:~ > find ~/share/music -name "*.m4a" -print | wc -l
191
ac@eggdrop:~ > find ~/share/music -name "*.m4p" -print | wc -l
371
ac@eggdrop:~ > find ~/share/music -name "*.ogg" -print | wc -l
0
ac@eggdrop:~ > _
Gee, I wonder why Apple isn't trying very hard... not saying that Apple should base their marketing decision on my hard drive, but I bet you'd find a similar situation on MOST hard drives out there...
iPod has more HP than Amiga, and Amiga can do Ogg (Score:5, Interesting)
John Klos
Running Amigas for more than a decade.
Re:This points to an issue for lossy codec design. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:So, wait... (Score:3, Interesting)
This, to me, is evidence of the problems with Ogg Vorbis, not of problems with the iPod...
Yeah, and DivX was flawed a few years ago because it took more CPU cycles to decode and wasn't supported by DVD players.
XviD is displacing DivX, and that's good. Too bad that mp3 will be much harder to avoid; still, doesn't mean that we who prefer OGG shouldn't keep spreading the word and asking companies for OGG support.
Free music (Score:3, Interesting)
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.