[vorbis-dev] Data smearing

[robert at moon.eorbit.net]

MP3 has this nasty habit of smearing data across many frames and
seeking into an MP3 stream is a messy task. The developer of oolabola
and myself are trying to get support for mp3 into his program, and one
of the problems is that seeking into an MP3 stream often gives you
artifacts because of the data smearing.

When you jump into the middle of an MP3 stream you may need to have a
number of previous frames available in order to properly decode the
current frame. That's not terrible if you can limit or predict how many
frames you need to back up to in order to get a clean decode of your
desired frame. But with MP3 there is no way to know how many frames you
need -- its a trial and error situation.

How does Vorbis handle this?

--ruaok         Freezerburn! All else is only icing. -- Soul Coughing

Robert Kaye -- robert at moon.eorbit.net  http://moon.eorbit.net/~robert

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