My random notes about the stuff I've done
Wishlist for N900 ogg-support
Time to switch to a Linux phone and time to start preparing ogg-support for N900/Fremantle.
Hopefully everything will be easier to get working with the N900 since at least the closed source Metalayer Crawler is replaced with open source Tracker.
I would like to hear if there’s anything special people would like to get with ogg-support. Support for oggs in the built-in media player with tags is of course the first goal but is there something else that is a must? Theora? Flac?
Thanks.
30 Comments
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Just for those interested in having Nokia shipping these by default: Feel free to vote for https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176 (Ogg Vorbis) and https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2527 (Flac).
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If possible, FLAC and Theora would be nice, but it’s not a must. I suppose OGG support in the built-in media player includes support for playing OGG files through GStreamer – if not, having OGG support for GStreamer would be a “must” in my opinion :) Thanks for your work!
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Both Theora and FLAC should be there. It’s not a matter of “how many people will really need this” (although it could well be we’re gonna be surprised about how many people will want at least Theora in the future), it’s a matter of principle. Nokia doesn’t care about such things, of course, and frankly they shouldn’t need to. Enthusiasts who believe in the free and open world believe in these codecs, so it’s their duty to get them to a device that at last has a decent level of compatibility to start with.
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I’ll try to find the time to add both theora and flac there then :)
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And yes, the idea is to support ogg in GStreamer and thus is many other places as well. Unfortunately that haven’t been enough for the built-in media player which have needed other tricks in addition to the gst support.
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I seem to recall people were talking about how Ogg music files are often used in games! If your bugfix can help with whatever underlying technologies the games are using, it’d scale down CPU usage for games that use Ogg files.
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Unfortunately the games often use e.g. SDL or some specific vorbis library directly so my ogg support for GStreamer doesn’t affect those. And most likely I can’t introduce any performance improvements, just the existing open source support packaged for the Fremantle.
I will do some benchmarking though, as soon as I get a device. It’s quite unclear to me what would be the most optimal implementation performance wise for the OMAP3. But we also need the tag support, so not all implementations are ok for the ogg-support.
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FLAC, please :)
With the absurd amount of storage in the n900 I wouldn’t need to reencode all my CDs I already have as encoded as flac …
Thanks!
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Especially for Nokia, the occlusion of OGG and FLAC is mysterious. It simply should be on there, after all why not?
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Oh. And I probably could use the N900 as an upnp client if it would support FLAC …
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I back all above requests for OGG and FLAC. I wish internet radio ogg streams are supported, too.
And, to make it even more functional, maybe APE support, too – http://www.monkeysaudio.com/ ? -
Afaik, OGG related codecs are usually excluded because they *may* have patent issues (that hasn’t been solved in the court and you can’t just buy an OGG license).
OGG radio streams would be nice, yes. Let’s see what all I can get to work on the first release..
APE isn’t related to OGG in anyway? I guess somebody should make a separate support for that one.
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Yes, APE has nothing to do with OGG, AFAIK, but since some ask for FLAC here I thought I would ask for APE, too :)
Good luck with implementation!
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it really is a shame that N900 doesnt have Ogg vorbis as default :-( My HTC magic has it and it works good.
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The flac-dsp project in garage provides DSP accelerated FLAC decoding for the n8x0. I use it every day using the built-in player. Might be worth a look for your n900 FLAC implementation.
https://garage.maemo.org/projects/dsp-flac/ -
FLAC is related to Ogg in the sense that the Ogg can be used as a container format for FLAC.
I’m not going to actually implement anything here. I’ll just take the best(?) implementations for this project and wrap them up.
I guess it wouldn’t be a very big task to port the dsp-flac to C64xx DSP in OMAP3. Optimizing it properly could be a bit bigger task, though. There are other products using the same DSP, like Gumstix, Beagleboard, and Pandora but unfortunately OpenEmbedded uses DSP Link and Nokia uses DSP Bridge (afaik). I guess the actual DSP code could be the same for both but the interface to the ARM side would need different implementations.
And sorry for writing “OGG” or “ogg”, since it is “Ogg”.
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I’d love to have Ogg support for the built-in player, both for local files and for streams.
If possible, I’d also love to have and support for the built-in browser, but that may prove impossible. In any case, hopefully Fennec will end up well-integrated on the N900.
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FLAC please! :)
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I for one root for properly optimized vorbis/theora and flac support for n900 as my music library is a jumble of both, and recoding half a TB to AAC is just pain.
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FLAC FLAC FLAC FLAC (please?)
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It would be great to have support for the tags of vorbisgain ( http://sjeng.org/vorbisgain.html ). I hate having to adjust playback volume all the time.
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Looks like vorbisgain needs support from the player, so most likely it won’t ever be supported by the built-in Media Player. I can consider that at some point but not for the initial n900 release.
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Last week, GPL ARMv4 Theora decoding libraries were announced on the Xiph.org Foundation mailing list.
http://wss.co.uk/pinknoise/theorarm/
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-September/002745.html -
Interesting, thanks.
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Lossless audio please :) (FLAC)
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green, read the next post :)
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If my N900 doesn’t have FLAC support when I get it, it will soon after. The *only* reason I will by an N900 is that I can do things like that, as opposed to the Droid or the iPhone. I have a portable “MP3 player” that I can’t (easily) mod, but it plays FLAC out of the box. If my SanDisk Sansa Clip can play FLAC out of the box, why can’t the N900?
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Is it already possible to play flac. i got my n900 yesterday!
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Flacs work, but the tag support isn’t yet implemented for flac, unfortunately.
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Theora video codec and Vorbis audio codec in Ogg container and FLAC in Ogg or native format working out of the box on N900 is probably must for a lot of music fans.
Workin Ogg support would be a deal-breaker for me in switching to N900.
