[Flac] playback problems with oppo BDP-95

[Brian Willoughby]

Thanks for bringing up this aspect, Nicholas.  I seem to recall that  
specific hardware has a problem with certain compression levels, but  
I cannot recall whether that was limited to just encoding, or  
decoding as well.  It could very well be true that I am conflating my  
vague memory of encoder limitations with decoder limitations.

It does seem to be that the oppo BDP-95 is exhibiting problems with  
particular flac files.  Since my original message, my friend has  
installed the latest version of flac and recompressed the exact files  
that were giving him a problem before - now with -0 or --fast he  
doesn't see a playback problem at all.  So, even though your  
statements make total sense to me, the evidence seems to indicate  
something about the compressed data that's causing a problem.  The  
original audio is not the issue, but how it is compressed.

Here's a thought: Since the encoder looks for polynomials, could it  
be possible that certain decoders cannot handle certain polynomials  
in real time?

Ah, another possibility is that the oppo BDP-95 implements an older  
version of the decoder, and it's merely new flac files that give it a  
headache.  My friend happened to have an old version of flac  
installed on his computer, 1.1.4, and that reported stream errors  
with his files until he upgraded to 1.2.1 - if the oppo has anything  
older than 1.2.1 then I suppose that might explain the decoding  
problems.

Brian


On Feb 5, 2011, at 16:33, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
> Correct me if wrong, but I was under the impression that the  
> processing required for playback was totally independent on the  
> level of compression. The encoder looks for polynomials that fit,  
> and it takes much more processing to find polynomials with a very  
> good fit and small residuals. On the other hand, the decoder just  
> has to multiply out the stored prediction, which is independent of  
> the compression level.
>
> Nicholas