idea for mpegplayer's voice disability (iriver h10)

[areeb]

Hey,
I was just thinking about how the lack of audio with the mpegplayer could be overcome without actually coding the player so that it can retrieve audio from the video file. (And I'm not an expert btw so tell me if I'm totally off) Would it be possible to let audio files play in the background while watching mpegplayer output. Just like how you can browse while listening to music. In that way, we could manually extract the audio file and modify it to add a beep into it as a "start video playback" signal so that we can manually synchronize the output. I know it's desperate but I'm holding my breath for watching proper video on the h10!

(And I just noticed that this should have gone in the Plugins/Viewers section but it won't let me change the category after submitting  )

[Llorean]

The problem has nothing to do with it being hard to code it to retrieve audio from the video.

The problem is that right now it won't even be close to fast enough realtime with both audio and video decoding happening.

[areeb]

Really eh? What if the audio was at a very low bitrate? No?

[Llorean]

For the H10 (and other portalplayer targets) the best solution would be to get the dual core architecture working properly.

[areeb]

How come you can play Doom with sound? Shouldn't that take more processing power than playing a simple video file?

[Llorean]

On what grounds do you have any information that suggests Doom requires more processing power (a game that ran on 386 PCs) than decoding an MPEG2 compressed video at a decent framerate?

[areeb]

yea you're right. I forgot that doom was able to run on such old machines. Ok well nevertheless, if you guys do get around to it just know that I'm holding my breath!

[miron73]

That's my first post so.. hi

Correct me if I'm wrong.

I suppose that H10 (and any other player) has it's own native, raw audio format that requires virtually no (read: very little) time to get 'decoded' and played. Maybe you should follow this path? You know - video requires re-encoding anyway (resize and format), so decoding audio to this raw format should not be a problem for end-user (i.e. me .

I'm completely newbie to embeeded devices (I own H10 for few days) so I may be completely wrong.

Regards

M.

PS. I think that mpegplayer is a really nice piece of work.

[Llorean]

If that were the path to be chosen, there'd be little point in using compressed video either.

Uncompressed video and audio could be accomplished with respectable playback speed but the filesize cost makes it even sillier than compressed video on a portable audio player.

[miron73]

You are right, but...

1. Video seems to work now
2. Uncompressed audio should be smaller than uncompressed video
3. You said that performance is a problem

So... if the lack of the power is the only 'show-stopper'...

Of course using uncompressed audio may sounds funny (or even silly). But you have to remember that some of this devices wasn't even designed to decode video. IMHO it's acceptable solution.

[Llorean]

Why not simply wait until optimizations can occur that will allow compressed  video with compressed audio.

The show stopper is a lack of anyone doing the work to get audio up and running and optimized. The lack of power is merely a hurdle, but one that should be overcome to do things "right", which is often considered important in this crowd.

[miron73]

I cannot say that I'm happy with that answer nor like it. But it's fair enough. Thanks.

[gnu]

Ipodlinux uses compressed video and uncompressed video for its mvpd format; it works very well. However, you have to set the audio rate to 16000 hz in order to get acceptable filesize...

I know this thread is about iriver h10, but on my ipod nano i get more than 20 frames per second. Wouldn't it be possible to miss out a few frames (12 frames per second would be more than enough) and use the resulting free CPU power to decode a WEAK audio compression? e.g. mp3 at 64 kbps ?

Just a thought...

[Llorean]

Ooooor, you could just have patience until the coprocessor is working, and wait for it to be done the right way.

[L]

Seriously, if watching video on a DAP is so important to you in the first place. Get one that does it by default.