"enhanced" aac podcasts

[michael.conner]

Is there any way to get these to work under Rockbox (other than transcoding to another format)? foobar2k treats them as normal aac files, but Rockbox goes to the WPS and then immediately returns to the file browser window.  

[Llorean]

What exactly do you mean by enhanced? The word enhanced in quotation marks doesn't mean much on its own.

[michael.conner]

What exactly do you mean by enhanced? The word enhanced in quotation marks doesn't mean much on its own.

Good point.  Enhanced podcasts are ones that have embedded pictures, chapter markers (so you can skip forward within the track), etc., within the M4A file.

[bk]

See this thread: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=7288.0

The 'enhanced' podcasts I've tried show similar metadata errors with mp4dump.

[bk]

Thanks to the recent commit ("3 Dec 13:51: Magnus Holmgren: Remove some unneeded code that caused problems for enhanced AAC files.") my enhanced podcasts now load and display metadata normally. Unfortunately they bomb out with a codec failure before the audio starts playing.

[Lear]

You sure you tested a build with the fix? Before that fix, it would load and display metadata properly, but "bomb out" with a codec failure...

[bk]

No, before that fix it wouldn't load at all. It would be skipped completely and the next track would be played.

[Lear]

Hm... Do you have a link to a podcast that shows the problem? The change I did was for the codec only, so it must be that the fix only solved part of the problem. It worked fine for the podcast I tested with though.

[bk]

Sure. http://75minutes.dreamhosters.com/audio/75minutes_69.m4a

Thanks for working on this.

[Lear]

Ah, that podcast fails for an entirely different reason - it's too long.

That's a known limitation in Rockbox. A table that is used during decode - and to calculate seek positions - is too large. I think it is possible to reduce the size of that table, but I haven't looked closer at it yet.

[michael.conner]

Here's another one:

http://media.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/m4a/308/bsg_episode_308_commentary_enhanced.m4a

[Lear]

Here's another one:

http://media.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/m4a/308/bsg_episode_308_commentary_enhanced.m4a

"The page you requested was not found."

However, if it is long (a bit over one hour), it is likely to fail for the same reason.

[michael.conner]

That's really weird about the link to that podcast I posted not working.  I clicked on it a few times just now, and 1 out of every 3 or 4 times, it would work -- the other times I'd get the "page not found error."

If it'd be useful, I can post what mp4dump says about the file.   The podcast is only 45 minutes or so.

[Lear]

Indeed, after several tries, I finally got it. This one fails because of an "unexpected" file structure. The metadata parser seems to handle it well, but the one in the codec isn't quite as flexible. Shouldn't be that hard to fix, I think, but I need to examine the file in more detail first.

[michael.conner]

The latest CVS fixed it.   Thanks!