[tremor] Tremor performance on x86 machines

[Corey Miller]

I am currently working on a linux distro designed to give legacy 
hardware the basic abilities a modern computer has.  My target machine 
to make it seem like it's running on a brand new computer is a 486/33.  
One really important feature would be music playing.  I was planning on 
using the ogg vorbis format for it.  Since I see performance such as 
%12 CPU use by tremor while playing on small handheld based processors, 
I was thinking tremor would be my best choice .  Since I plan on 
compiling and installing each piece during installation of my distro 
and use hardware detection, I could make it so if the computer's 
processor is under a certain level of power, it would make tremor with 
the low accuracy flag.  And since to keep things simple and unbloated 
this would be the only music format other than the standards like wav, 
that could be decoded in real time.  So I was going to write many 
scripts for handling other formats, make it so people rip CDs, the 
quality settings would be based on their computer, and when they 
download or recieve music somehow, it would be encoded into ogg, yet 
again through a script deciding the best quality settings for them.  
Simply, it would base the -q setting on a few factors, the hard drive 
size (if their legacy hardware has a ~150 meg hard drive I don't want 
it encoding at -q 7) and their IO speed and RAM, so files don't get so 
large that they are limited by not being able to be read fast enough 
off the drive or need to be cached so much that it has to use virtual 
memory for that.  But more importantly for the topic of my message, the 
scripts would decide the ripping and converting sampling rate and 
number of channels.  This would be based on the speed of the computer.  
Because an 11khz mono vorbis file, from what I hear, uses only a 
fraction of the processing power to decode that a 44khz stereo file 
does.  The question I'm getting down to is this.  I don't have my test 
equipment or the dev system as of yet, or any x86 to test this one, so 
I need to know, would the tremor engine with the low accuracy mod be 
able to decode an 11 khz mono vorbis file in real time without eating 
up too much CPU?  Hopefully they could listen to something of this low 
quality while browsing the net or something.

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