Lack of hardware support [LWN.net]

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.

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.

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.