Lack of hardware support

Posted Jul 7, 2009 0:39 UTC (Tue) by joedrew (guest, #828)
In reply to: Lack of hardware support by moxfyre
Parent article: Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

> Basically no one does hardware decoding of audio or video anymore. The iPod/iPhone? Software decoding on an ARM-core processor.

Wrong - the iPod has hardware for decoding AAC, MP3 and H.264. They *also* have a general-purpose ARM core.

Lack of hardware support

Posted Jul 7, 2009 4:58 UTC (Tue) by gmaxwell (guest, #30048) [Link]

An arm core which is significantly faster than is required to decode Theora at the resolution of the iphone screen

Okay, so perhaps it would have lower battery life on that device. And? The proposal is a baseline. If the user and the content provider prefer something else, they are free to use something else.

Lack of hardware support

Posted Jul 7, 2009 11:16 UTC (Tue) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (1 responses)

"Wrong - the iPod has hardware for decoding AAC, MP3 and H.264."

This 'hardware' will actually be a relatively general purpose DSP which is almost certainly reprogrammable to decode theora.

Lack of hardware support

Posted Jul 7, 2009 17:57 UTC (Tue) by joedrew (guest, #828) [Link]

> This 'hardware' will actually be a relatively general purpose DSP which is almost certainly reprogrammable to decode theora.

Nope - it's a specialized block of functionality added to Apple's Samsung-fabbed ASIC, the chip that also includes the ARM core.

Some iPods, the iPod video in particular, did include a DSP, but all recent ones are specialized hardware.