Tremor, the integerized decoder for Ogg Vorbis, has been relicensed to a BSD-style license. This means that it is now free to use in portable players, like the Empeg, with no royalties. Here is a page that announces this and has addresses for people to bug the companies

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/hardware.html

If you haven't had a chance to check out Vorbis yet, head over to the 1.0 demo page at http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/listen.html

Winamp 2.80 or newer will play .ogg files natively.

Jon

Woah.

Peter

This looks pretty good. The other free integer implementation fixpvorbis (or something like that) required too many resources to run on the RioReceiver, but ran okay on the empeg.

This xiph implementation has some hand coded assembler for the arm which hopefully will require fewer resources and will be more efficient.

I've got it compiled for the empeg, but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, I'll do it later tonight, assuming I can schedule some computer time from the wife.

Greg

This is the same integerized decoder that has been in use on the Sharp Zaurus handheld from TheKompany (the product is tkcPlayer). I have seen at least one person reporting that it uses less cpu on the zaurus than the mp3 decoder does.

That earlier fixed-point decoder was done by a random guy just trying to integerize the existing decoder libs, and had known problems. This one was written by Monty, the author of Vorbis. It hopefully will be very problem-free, but I'm interested to hear your opinions on it once you work with it some more.

I just can't wait to finally get Vorbis support on my Empeg. Maybe now that they can add it across the entire product line instead of just on the Empeg, the guys at Sonicblue will have more of an incentive to add support.

Jon

So it works. At this point I don't know if it works faster or more efficiently than fixpvorbis (as I suspect it does), but nevertheless it works on the empeg with no problem.

Waiting to hear how it works on the rioreceiver. If it does, my guess is we'll have a RioPlay application running flac/mp3/ogg shortly thereafter.

Greg

That earlier fixed-point decoder was done by a random guy

The same random guy, in fact, who ported ARM Linux to the StrongARM...

Peter

Ahh, pardon my ignorance on that point then. However, that's not to say that the fixpvorbis didn't still have known problems. Monty commented on it on slashdot yesterday, I'll link to his post here.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=39218&cid=4191921

Btw greg, Monty also stated: "The original target for Tremor was a 74MHz Cirrus Maverick (ARM 7 TDMI core)."

Jon

However, that's not to say that the fixpvorbis didn't still have known problems. Monty commented on it on slashdot yesterday

That isn't Pitre's code he's talking about. He means the HipZip decoder that's on Sourceforge somewhere. Pitre integerised a modern (near-1.0) Vorbis.

Peter