[SWLUG] OGG on Sony W810i phone?

[Dave Cridland]

On Tue Jul  4 16:56:40 2006, Jonathan Wright wrote:
> Dave Cridland wrote:
>> For bizarre reasons I have yet to understand, mobile phone people 
>> are not yet shipping Ogg or Vorbis support. Perhaps it's more CPU 
>> intensive to decode than MP3, or something - mobile phone people 
>> are universally paranoid of anything touching battery life.
> 
> From what I understand (and it's not a lot :) is that OGG required 
> floating-point operations to decode correctly. MP3 (and IIRC, ACC 
> and WMA) don't - they just need integer maths.
> 
> 
Ah.


> As a consequence, the processors that they needs are much simpler, 
> smaller, less powerful, but more importantly, cheaper. As there 
> isn't much call for OGG, there isn't much need to add the more 
> expensive variant.
> 
> 
Well, every mobile device out there, pretty well, uses ARM. I don't 
even know if they do floating point.

But more interestingly, they all have to do TLS, etc, as a matter of 
course, which is pretty CPU intensive, yet mobile phones have never 
included crypto processors, which are, so I'm told, dirt cheap these 
days.

Personally, I suspect the mobile crowd of being deeply weird again. 
("But mobile is a special environment, which has new challenges" gets 
raised a lot. The new challenges are flaky connectivity, low 
bandwidth, and poor CPU. Anyone who owned a 286 and a modem probably 
notes that these new challenges seem remarkably like the old ones, 
but that's purely imaginary.)

I do note that the new 770 release also doesn't do Ogg, still. This 
may be because of an ARM not being good enough (although nobody seems 
to complain about putting an Ogg decoder on it as third party), but 
equally it might be because they don't want to be forced by example 
to put one on mobiles.


> I think there has been a lot of move to create an integer-only 
> decoder for OGG's, but I don't know how successfully this was/has 
> been.

The other likely reason is that Ogg is perceived to have a 
relationship with illegal music sharing, or worse, fair use.

Dave.
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