RE: [GD-Windows] MP3 Playback under Windows

[Scott B. <gas...@nw...>]

Hey this discussion got me thinking. When are consumer sound cards going
to start supporting hardware decompression? Or at least provide some
common DSP type functions that can be used by drivers to aid
decompressing formats like MP3, WMA, and Ogg? Are do they do this
already and nobody uses it?

I would like to keep all of our sound samples in compressed format, but
there's just too much overhead - even on a fast PC, decoding and mixing
10 MP3 samples simultaneously will eat up a bunch of CPU, so we reserve
the compressed samples for the streaming type stuff like musical score,
ambient effects, and dialogue (never more than 2 or 3 of these at once).

I assume that the little handhelds like the Rio have an ARM or something
that decodes in software... But in order for games to use this, we'll
need multiple simultaneous sample decoding support with dedicated
circuits, not an embedded risc processor. Is this kind of thing on the
horizon? Is there even a need for it??

Scott

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gam...@li...
> [mailto:gam...@li...] On
> Behalf Of Scott Bilas
> Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001 12:17 PM
> To: gam...@li...
> Subject: RE: [GD-Windows] MP3 Playback under Windows
>
>
> > > MP3 requires licensing per file, and I think as a result,
> > many games
> > > ship in violation. But if you use the Miles sound system,
> it comes
> > > with a royalty-free MP3 license. That's most of the
> > motivation for us
> > > for using Miles. Plus it's fully backwards compatible with even
> > > non-DirectX systems, not too expensive, and has wicked fast
> > > decoding/mixing.
> >
> > Or you could use Ogg Vorbis which works fine for us. There
> should be
> > sample apps available at http://www.vorbis.com.
>
> We tested Ogg Vorbis a while ago, but we found that its
> decoding performance was way too low to be useful to us. But
> that was at least a year ago, I assume it's been optimized
> since (especially if you're recommending it).
>
> Btw do NOT use WMA for anything. It is SLOW SLOW SLOW. The
> audio quality and tools are quite good but it is designed for
> IE and media players, not for low-latency games.
>
> Scott
>
>
>
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