Hardware support for audio decoding

[Steven Merel]

Hi,

My understanding is that currently, OpenSL ES doesn't allow decoding of compressed audio (e.g. MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc) to memory, so if I'd like to do something with the audio in a compressed file, I need to decode it myself with my own software decoder.  Now, in theory, OpenSL could be using hardware acceleration on the device for decoding audio, which means that doing the decoding in software would be much slower.  In practice, though, does anyone know how common such hardware is, and for which audio formats?  Is there any way to find out from the NDK or SDK whether a given device has a hardware decoder for a particular audio format?

(I understand there are licensing issues with decoding MP3 files in particular, which I don't want to get into here... just interested in the technical info.)

thanks

-steve

www.crickettechnology.com

[mic _]

I remember that we were using some h/w-accelerated codecs on an Èclair-based product. For MP3 and AAC and possibly some other formats. There were some stability issues with those codecs though, so in the end we might've used all-s/w codecs.. I can't recall exactly since it's been about a year since that project.

Anyway, I don't think you should be too worried about using s/w codecs. I'd expect something like libMAD to give you adequate performance.

/Michael

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[Glenn Kasten]

Please see also these earlier related threads:

"Decode MP3 using OpenSL NDK"
http://groups.google.com/group/android-ndk/browse_thread/thread/b795132da7e6a2d1/d94cce92eed7b8f8

"audio decoding in NDK"
http://groups.google.com/group/android-ndk/browse_thread/thread/8cafb9deb1f77af9/33625cb67a740d27