Lack of hardware support

Posted Jul 7, 2009 11:16 UTC (Tue) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
In reply to: Lack of hardware support by joedrew
Parent article: Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

"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.