[vorbis] Ogg Vorbis + Hardware

[Alistair Strachan]

Hello,

I'm undergoing a project in which I'm researching the viability of different
portable audio formats for implementation in hardware. I have owned, for a
number of years, Creative's Nomad II MG portable MP3 player, and recently
posted several messages asking about Ogg Vorbis support on this product
line.

Amongst flames and miscellanous trivia, somebody from Creative actually
posted a reply claiming that Ogg Vorbis would be a technically challenging
format to implement on such a portable device. The device currently manages
the proprietary/closed WMA and MP3 formats; apparently the device has some
sort of universal hardware in place for decoding packets for these
compressed audio formats.

My understanding was that they all, including Ogg Vorbis, used a modified
DCT algorithm to pack samples, by (often roughly) approximating wave forms.
Assuming this device has some sort of "chip", specifically designed to work
with MDCT and output PCM samples, is it true that Ogg Vorbis is in some way
more computationally demanding than either MP3 or WMA, and if so, how?

I assume this is the best place to ask, as hopefully some of you will be
relative geniuses wrt audio compression and will know the guts of Ogg Vorbis
and MP3 like the palms of your respective hands. I would greatly appreciate
any feedback, so I may write about these "limitations" in more depth and
possibly so I can further the case for Vorbis' implementation with Creative
Labs.

TIA.

Kindest regards,
Alistair Strachan.

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