[Flac-dev] FLAC support for Android?

[Dave Chapman]

Hi,

I'm a developer with the Rockbox project - http://www.rockbox.org - 
which is a written-from-scratch operating system and application suite 
designed for portable audio players.

We of course support FLAC, and have a small, well-optimised (for 
embedded targets, including ARM) decoder which I think would be perfect 
for the devices Android runs on.  It is based on the decoder from 
ffmpeg, and hence is licensed under the LGPL, with Rockbox specific code 
licensed under the GPL.

I don't know if the GPL will be a problem with this part of Android.  If 
the LGPL is compatible, then I'm sure the relevant Rockbox developers 
(including myself) would be happy to donate their code under that license.

We initially implemented FLAC playback in Rockbox using libFLAC, but 
achieved significant speed gains (and reduced code size) when switching 
to the smaller ffmpeg decoder.  I'm afraid I don't have exact figures to 
hand, but can try and dig them out if people are interested.

Our current decoder can decode a typical FLAC file using about 13MHz of 
an arm7tdmi core.  On portable (battery-powered) devices, performance is 
very important.

The Rockbox source code can be browsed here:

http://svn.rockbox.org/viewvc.cgi/trunk/

See apps/codecs/ for our codecs.

If I was going to attempt to implement this, I would definitely go for 
the ffmpeg decoder, rather than libFLAC, assuming the license is OK.

Regards,

Dave.