From: Dave Chapman <dave_at_dchapman.com>
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:07:26 +0100

Fabian Merki wrote:
> - wma playback (i'm too lazy to convert those file i got from "somewhere")

I'm sure this will become one of the most frequent FAQs - mainly because
existing iRiver users may well have collections of WMA files already on
their devices.

Obviously, Rockbox by its nature won't deal with any encrypted files (I
don't know if the iRiver firmware does?).

In theory, Rockbox could include support for unencrypted WMA files, but
the only open source WMA decoder uses floating-point maths. The
Coldfire processor on the iRiver doesn't have a floating-point unit, so
all floating point maths is "emulated" in software. Which means
decoding will be _really_ slow - i.e. not real-time.

The solution will be to rewrite the open source WMA decoder to use
integer or fixed-point maths, but no-one has (yet) shown any interest in
doing that.

If anyone is interested, the WMA decoder in question is part of the
"ffmpeg" library.

I may at some point try and integrate that decoder into Rockbox, as
motivation for someone to rewrite it, but obviously I want to work on
getting the existing codecs working properly first.

Dave.
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Received on 2005-06-12