Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

Adding WMA support (possible starting point)

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scubacoles:
This is not an issue for me as I have no wma's but I know for others it is a big issue.
I'm offering this as perhaps the start (or re-start) of a wma codec for Rockbox project for someone who needs/wants it.
My Symbian phone has a wma player called WMAPlus! It's a commercial product but demo's are available. It's based largely on the open source OggPlay for Symbian and UIQ phones. and only plays unprotected wma's (not DRM'ed files).
The codec included in WMAPlus! is a .dll file for ARM architecture. I've included it here as it is available for potential disassembly via the downloadable demo, therefore is legally a grey area I think. Rename the file WMAPLUGINDECODER.dll

I'm guessing (I have no programming skills at all so I may well be entirely wrong) that it may be a good start towards wma support, particularly for ARM based targets.

If not, I guess this thread is a waste of space.
Hope it helps.
Steve

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bluebrother:
If this is a commercial product, are you allowed to distribute the binary library? And are you aware of FS#4984?

Bagder:
I failed to find a license for WMAplus but it seems it is available for download just about everywhere.

However, Symbian phones and PDAs are usually equipped with ARM-cores running in several hundred MHz so I would expect that even our current efforts would run fine there. What we need is a highly optimized version that runs on our tiny targets (in comparision to the Symbian ones).

There are also other .so files with WMA codecs for ARM if anyone would really think disassembling is the way forward for this codec development.

Personally, I think the development of WMA for Rockbox is this slow because not many developers care about WMA.

scubacoles:
Yeah, I was aware of the existing wma codec, but didn;t realise it was quite as progressed as it apparently is. I have read somewhere the guy developing it has stopped/postponed work due to his house burning down.

As for distributing a commercial library, I'll leave that up to moderators to decide... Since it's available to download as a complete package, I don't see an issue with distributing a portion of it for reference purposes. Mods may have other thoughts...

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