[whatwg] Make Vorbis a baseline codec for <audio>

[Maik Merten]

Arve Bersvendsen wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:23:40 +0200, Nils Dagsson Moskopp
> <nils-dagsson-moskopp at dieweltistgarnichtso.net> wrote:
> 
>> Am Mittwoch, den 15.07.2009, 19:16 -0500 schrieb Adam Shannon:
>>
>>> It has been tried but Apple will not implement it due to hardware
>>> limitations.
>>
>> As if. I somehow recall that a few years ago, a Linux Distribution on
>> Ipod did Vorbis (and Doom, incidentally - that was the original reason
>> for me to put it on said device).
>>
>> <http://ipodlinux.org/> seems to be dead, though.
> 
> The project you're looking for is Rockbox, http://rockbox.org/ -- afaik,
> it does vorbis decoding in software, and had (has?) a battery lifetime
> half of what the stock ipod firmware had.

An nice thing is that Rockbox provides CPU-consumption numbers for an
interesting set of codecs on various hardware platforms:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/CodecPerformanceComparison

Apparently Vorbis is about as complex as MP3, while AAC is a bit more
expensive (this may be implementation specific). Anyway, all codecs only
use a fraction of the available CPU time and the battery lifetime seems
to mostly depend on proper device-dependant power management (here
Rockbox lacks a bit, AFAIK). Given Vorbis plays even on old iPods
"hardware limitations" may not be a 100% accurate assessment.

Maik