Bugzilla – Bug 1061
Ogg Vorbis Support in Firmware
Last modified: 2009-09-08 09:30:37 UTC
Native support of OGG VORBIS format in firmware. I've read that FLAC is now supported in Slimserver2. My friends and I have been waiting for native OGG VORBIS support. It is a drag to have to incur the overhead and increased bandwidth requirements to convert to WAV. The option to use LAME to convert to MP3 kind of defeats the purpose of having a OGG library in the first place. If we wanted MP3 we would have encoded in that format in the first place. What are the plans to support the OGG VORBIS format in firmware?
SB2 has the option of transcoding to FLAC rather than MP3. This gives you the bandwidth benefits of compression without the quality loss of MP3. It's not quite the same as Ogg Vorbis in firmware, but I'm hoping it's a reasonable stopgap measure.
I haven't run the FLAC transcode function. Is the processor overhead less than the current conversion to WAV? I do understand that the amount of data sent over the LAN will be less, but of course not to the degree that would be available if OGG was supported. My problem with SB1 is dropouts. Can you please advise if it is possible to incorporate this firmware change into SB2 or whether a entire new player (SB3 for instance) would be required? Thanks for your quick response.
I'll be frank - I haven't spent any time looking at the Ogg decoder, so I don't know what its CPU and memory requirements are. My experience with porting MP3 was that the processor in the SB2 had plenty of cycles to handle decoding, though getting it to fit within the memory constraints of the processor required some work. If the Ogg decoder is anything like MAD (the MP3 decoder we use), then it should be possible to port. Please interpret this as only an uninformed guess regarding the feasibility of doing an Ogg decoder port to SB2 and not as a guarantee that it will be done. The only guarantee that I can make is that Ogg decoding in firmware will not be a launch-time feature of SB2.
Thank you for your quick and honest response. Please advise as more information becomes available.
I'm trying to vote for this bug, but the screen does not have a "vote for this bug" button or link. I'm logged in with a username/password. Any ideas?
I strongly vote for native ogg vorbis support that it is possible to fast forward and rewind ogg files and to remember the position within an ogg file when saving a playlist.
Yup, ogg's my favorite format too. Added CC.
Yes Please, very important
Ogg Vorbis support in firmware would be great! This would save me a hardware upgrade of my fanless VIA C3, since decoding in the Squeezebox would not eat up CPU ressources on the server. :-) And maybe fast forward and rewind will then be possible. Thumbs up! Chris
Please add ogg. It's the only other format that properly supports gapless playback after FLAC. I have a massive amount if music as ogg, very important to me.
Hey Dean, Any news on this one? Is it forgotten, or have you assigned a target milestone for it?
Subject: Re: Ogg Vorbis Support in Firmware It's on our list, but isn't slated for the next (6.5) release.
Two days ago I received a check-in e-mail with the following contents: Author: titmuss Date: Thu Feb 9 16:06:21 2006 New Revision: 6190 URL: http://svn.slimdevices.com?rev=6190&view=rev Log: SlimProtoLib: - Added native ogg support (needs slimserver patch to work) ... Does this mean native ogg support is also close for the "real" squeezbox?
squeezebox firmware, and softsqueeze software are not tied on features. The message simply refers to a native ogg implementation for a software connection library that richard is working on. Eventually, that software will be folded into Softsqueeze. It has no bearing on the squeezebox itself.
(In reply to comment #3) > I'll be frank - I haven't spent any time looking at the Ogg decoder, so I don't > know what its CPU and memory requirements are. My experience with porting MP3 > was that the processor in the SB2 had plenty of cycles to handle decoding, > though getting it to fit within the memory constraints of the processor required > some work. If the Ogg decoder is anything like MAD (the MP3 decoder we use), > then it should be possible to port. > Tremor is an Ogg decoder that is similar to MAD. http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/
Would LOVE to see native Ogg support. I have a large Ogg library, and it would be great to be able to fast forward etc. I also love the fact that Ogg is truely open source.
*** Bug 3205 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
What's the difference between a target milestone of "future" and "---"? If it's an enhancement that is planned, and if it isn't slated for a particular version, then what else can it be besides "future"? If it's NOT planned then please say so and mark it resolved.
Subject: Re: Ogg Vorbis Support in Firmware Sorry for the confusion. I changed the target from Future, meaning "after 6.5", to ---, meaning "undefined", as we discuss the firmware roadmap here and look over the open bugs.
*** Bug 3217 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
About the roadmap (http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?SoftwareRoadmap) : - do you have approximative release dates ? - will ogg vorbis native support be included in 7.0 ?
Ok, I bought 3 squeezboxes because after I tried one I thought it was one of the best products ever, and because it said that it supported ogg vorbis!!! But it doesn't... decoding/transcoding at the server doesn't count! My music collection is entirely in Oggs, because I actually own all my music and it wouldn't make sense to encode it in an inferior non-free format. The result is that I don't have the full feature set that's advertised available to me, plus if I try to sync a couple of my squeezeboxes my wireless network is saturated and any other network activity causes dropouts. Syncing all 3 is impossible. Needless to say, I'm a bit ticked off. Come on slim people, this is a no-brainer! ogg vorbis is free, superior, has good streaming support, oh, and did I mention that it's free, no nasty patents, etc.? The tremor integer decoder is highly portable, it should be a one-day project. You can get it here: http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/. Please do this soon or remove all mention of ogg vorbis support from your advertising. Or else open up the firmware and let us do it.
Subject: Re: Ogg Vorbis Support in Firmware Thanks for the feedback, Jurgen. We agree, wanting ogg vorbis the licensing issues around ogg vorbis are a no brainer and it's something we really want to do and are planning to do, but unfortunately, porting codecs to the IP3K architecture is surprisingly difficult. The good news is that we have a full time engineer on the firmware working in this area. And the work has begun. Thanks for your patience. -dean
Just FYI... I now have my 266MHz NSLU1 running slimserver AND decoding oggs using the Tremor integer decoder (low memory branch). CPU usage is about evenly split between slimserver and sox (which is doing the deocding using the Tremor library), and while total CPU usage is about 90% I never get any dropouts. Also the whole sox process never uses more than about 900 bytes of working memory! And while I haven't counted, I imagine more than half of that is sox's overhead. Porting sox to use tremor instead of vorbisfile took only a minor change to the vb_read invocation and a byte swap on the buffer.
Hi Why do people encode their music to Ogg Vorbis instead of mp3? Part of the reason is that they want superior quality sound, and Ogg Vorbis can give this. Why do people buy Squeezeboxes instead of just getting a better soundcard for their PC? Because a Squeezebox gives superior quality sound output compared with a PC. The conclusion is, people who use Ogg Vorbis are likely to be people who want to buy Squeezeboxes. I do, but I want Ogg Vorbis support first. It makes [business] sense to me, hopefully it will to slimdevices too. I wait with baited breath for Ogg Vorbis firmware support (and in the meantime I'll save up my pennies.) :-) Thanks in advance. W.
Oh, and I should have mentioned. For heaven's sake make sure *your* implementation of an Ogg Vorbis decoder does playback ogg vorbis files back perfectly gaplessly! My portable music player does not play back ogg files gaplessly and it drives my nuts! :) Thanks again.
I'll vote for native ogg support too. I just got my first SB3 because they said it would support ogg. It doesn't. :(
Subject: Re: Ogg Vorbis Support in Firmware SB3 does support Ogg through transcoding on the server. Works great. The prime motivation for adding a built-in ogg decoder in firmware is to add support for Ogg radio on SqueezeNetwork where transcoding isn't feasible.
> The prime motivation for adding a built-in ogg decoder in > firmware is to add support for Ogg radio on SqueezeNetwork where > transcoding isn't feasible. Don't forget about fast forward/rewind which is not possible when transcoding.
And less CPU utilization on the box running the slimserver, which means smaller boxen can be applied for it.
Please wait no longer ... native ogg is supported in firmware 58. It is currently undergoing internal testing. You will be notified again when it is made part of a nightly release. Enjoy :)
And there was much rejoicing... Hooray! Thank you and congratulations to the Slim team.
I apologize; I've been slow in adding this notification to some of the bugs. Please ignore it if you've already tried the new firmware. This bug fix is now available in the nightly Slimserver release. The release is available from: http://www.slimdevices.com/dev_nightly.html You'll need to install the new version of Slimserver, and then force your Squeezebox to upgrade its firmware by holding down the 'Brightness' button on the remote control until the firmware upgrade process begins. If you are still experiencing this problem after upgrading your affected players to the new firmware, please reopen the bug.