Archive for March, 2007

Why we should have another Monkey’s Audio decoder implementation

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

Why should I bother about Monkey’s Audio? Because many pirates good people offer classical music in this format (FLAC is quite rare and I’ve seen WavPack only once).

What I consider wrong in Monkey’s Audio design:

  • No verson compatibility – each version alters decoding process
  • Huge blocks – some megabytes is huge indeed (WavPack – 64k, FLAC – even less), hence inaccurate seeking and big memory requirements
  • “Insane” profile – if it does not decode in realtime on my CPU that is unusable

What I consider wrong in MA implementation:

  1. There is only one implementation (with two known ports)
  2. It is not endian-safe (both generated WAV headers and < 3.92 decoding)
  3. OO in that case means “Object-Obfuscated” (i.e. too many files where you can’t easily find required code)
  4. Custom license

Maybe during GSoC somebody will write easily understandable portable decoder in Lavc that will allow playback of .APE in FFplay,MPlayer,VLC,Xine,etc. Otherwise I’ll have to do it myself.

VC-1: Some Bugs Squashed

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

This and last weekend I fixed some bugs in my decoder so now watching HD-DVD/BluRay movies will be a bit more pleasant ;-). But for the whole watching and listening experience you should wait for E-AC3 decoder (maybe it will be implemented during Google Summer of Code).

As for me, my systems neither are fast enough to decode it in realtime (1.42Ghz PPC G4 and PII 266Mhz) nor can even display full picture (max. resolution is 1280×1024 but I’m fine with it). So you may conclude I’m not interested in watching HD and you will be right. But I care for decoder and will fix bugs in it as I do already.