Ogg Support in Fremantle Extras
In my last post I asked for a wish list of features for the Ogg Support. I started the integration work based on those comments and now the 1.0.5 version for n900 has been promoted to Fremantle Extras repository.
The support for Vorbis audio is good: tags work, File Manager shows them too and knows how to launch Vorbis files in Media Player, etc. Flacs are missing tags but no magic is needed for that, just a new GStreamer element. Theora support is also included. I haven’t tested it much but at least the basic features seem to work.
I’ll tell more about the details at the Maemo Summit.
Thanks to you, now i can listen to all my music without transcoding on my N900. :)
Comment by Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) — October 4, 2009 @ 5:52 pm
This is great news, thanks so much!
Comment by Sebi — October 4, 2009 @ 6:39 pm
How are the performance? Does it drain the battery as on the N810 or can we actually use it as a decent OGG music player?
Comment by Guillaume — October 4, 2009 @ 7:16 pm
For now it’s using the libvorbis from xiph.org. It’s not as efficient as possible but it provided the best feature set.
I’m planning to switch to ffmpeg, once Felipe’s gst-av[1] supports tags and streaming (Felipe wouldn’t mind people helping him with those). The performance of ffmpeg’s floating point vorbis decoder is better than the xiph.org’s decoder performance.
[1] http://github.com/felipec/gst-av
Comment by tuomas — October 4, 2009 @ 7:35 pm
Er, I doubt the FFmpeg one is floating point.
Anyway, answering the performance question: at least in my quick measurements of gst-av the battery usage seems to be even less than the official MP3 decoder. I still have to confirm, but at least it’s nothing sort of bad :)
Comment by Felipe Contreras — October 5, 2009 @ 1:58 am
Good job. Thanks a lot.
Comment by Jon Pritchard — October 5, 2009 @ 2:15 am
Thanks very much for your work - this will be one of the first packages I install after I get my N900!
Comment by Matt Austin — October 5, 2009 @ 4:31 am
Felipe, I based my comment about ffvorbis being floating point to Siarhei’s comment here:
http://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176#c124
Comment by tuomas — October 5, 2009 @ 11:56 am
So glad I will be able to immediately fill my N900 with FLAC files once it arrives.
Do FLAC files work directly in the official music player? If so, is the lack of tags going to be a problem there?
I’m kinda hoping the N900 will work as well or better than the iPod Touch for music playback as I do not want to carry both and my iPod is only 8GB. Also being able to add music from my web server while on-the-move is a huge benefit over the iPod.
I will reserve any more questions until I actually have my N900 as there is no point worrying about what it can’t do right now, when you may have fixed the problem by the time I get my hands on one.
Comment by Alex Atkin UK — October 5, 2009 @ 10:17 pm
The official Media Player won’t show the Flac tags with the ogg-support 1.0.5 release already in extras. But to get them working we only need a flacparser gst element. I’m sure it won’t take very long to get one implemented by the community.
Comment by tuomas — October 6, 2009 @ 6:47 am
With ogg-support installed, will Ogg *streams* work correctly in the built-in media player? In particular, do song transitions work correctly in streams?
Comment by Anonymous — October 7, 2009 @ 9:57 am
The streaming isn’t tested extensively. I tested couple of ogg streams and they worked. E.g. kohina.org did manage to switch the songs ok. No Ogg tags in streams, and I don’t even know how they should be working.
Comment by tuomas — October 7, 2009 @ 10:00 am
Thank you very much!
Comment by Borghal — October 7, 2009 @ 2:03 pm
Really great news. I hate my iphone about not supporting lossless free codecs!
Eager to try
Thank you
Comment by Onur Baser — October 7, 2009 @ 8:42 pm
hi, will ogg and flac be gapless? ive used several ogg players on symbian plaforms, but none were ever gapless.
that would be my one and only feature request! thanks!
Comment by jamie — October 8, 2009 @ 9:21 am
What do you mean by gapless?
Comment by tuomas — October 8, 2009 @ 9:24 am
on albums where the songs are continuous (live music, etc), tracks plays seamlessly from track to track with no gap/pause/blank samples, like a real CD.
rio karma has always been gapless. ipods figured it out around the 5th generation or so. i have never seen any symbian players operate gaplessly
Comment by jamie — October 8, 2009 @ 7:01 pm
The playback seems not the be gapless with the Media Player for Oggs. I don’t know how to implement gapless playback but I guess it would need mainly support from the player itself instead of having “gapless support” in the framework.
Comment by tuomas — October 12, 2009 @ 9:38 am
Flac tags are an excellent feature. I commend your solid work & look forward to seeing this developed.
Linus
Comment by Linus Torvalds — November 26, 2009 @ 8:53 am