[Tremor] Implementing Tremor on low-end ARM

[Nicholas Vinen]

Peter Harris wrote:
> Nicholas Vinen wrote:
>   
>> I too would be interested to know under what circumstances the various
>> tables might grow. I tested up to 96kHz 24bit stereo with these buffer
>> sizes and it seemed to work fine. Yes, I will only support 1 or 2
>> channels since my player only has stereo output anyway.
>>     
>
> Lower quality files tend to use longer blocks, and therefore use more
> memory in the decoder. Try encoding a file at -q 0 (or lower). Even
> then, the tables won't be as large as the spec allows. Unfortunately, I
> don't think there are any pathological test files available.
>
> Peter Harris
>   

OK, I tried encoding a file at every integer quality setting between -1
and 10

Interestingly I found memory requirements did increase at lower quality
levels, but certain buffers grew at higher quality settings too.

I think what I am going to do is change my patch so that pretty much
everything is allocated out of a single buffer, the only exception being
those few/small chunks which actually get freed before the end of
playback. This should (a) simplify it and speed it up a bit and (b)
means that you only have to care about the maximum total memory usage.
The worst case I tested is quality -1 which required 46400 bytes. This
is definitely in the upper limit of what I can spare on a 64K system
given that I calculated I need at least 12KB and possibly 16KB of audio
buffer! Those two alone exhaust practically all RAM, and I need space
for some file system buffers etc. I may end up supporting -q0 through
-q10 which, in this case at least, reduces the memory requirement to
34412 bytes - a massive difference! -q10 requires 39835 bytes, and going
above this doesn't seem to increase it.


I also discovered my comment skipping patch breaks at certain quality
levels (e.g. -q4). After I fix up the static allocation I'll have a go
at improving this.


Nicholas

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