sethapprox wrote:At this point does the Chumby have the mp3 alarmclock ability? Because as far as I can tell that’s been one of it’s biggest selling points for a lot of people, and it’s starting to sound if that isn’t going to happen.
The FlashLite license from Adobe includes an MP3 license, and the current FlashLite player supports MP3 and PCM audio embedded in the Flash movie. We are working on the ability to play external MP3 files, what FlashLite considers "device audio".
I am sort of familiar with various copyleft licenses, and some of the specifics of the general Chumby license, but I don’t know anything about the legalities of ‘us’ using adobe’s flash player. But what I think you’re saying is that we can’t include GPL’d code into the Flash Player code because the GPL carries over and would GPL Adobe’s IP correct? OGG Vorbis is ok because it’s an open standard, but MP3 is a no-no because it is copyrighted and is the source of Microsoft’s current woes.
It's not an issue of copyright, it's an issue of patents. Presumably Adobe, like everyone else, obtained a patent license from Fraunhofer/Thomson in good faith, which they've sublicensed to us. While it would appear that there may be some uncertainty with regard to the MP3 patents with the recent Alcatel-Lucent/Microsoft litigation, my understanding is that is was over the *encoding* of MP3 files, not the decoding. In any case, we're watching the situation.
While many folks claim that Ogg Vorbis is unencumbered, there are others in the audio community that think that it may, in fact, run afoul of some patents. In the current software patent environment, it's really hard to know for sure that *anything* is clear of potential patent problems - certainly we all thought the MP3 situation was as clear as it could be.
The fact that something is an Open standard does not mean that it's not unencumbered - AAC and several of the MPEG variants are equally Open but require licensing. In any case, there are actual implementations of various codecs covered by various licenses, and the fact that FlashLite is closed (by Adobe, not us) means that certain implementations that are "copyleft" in nature, including the GPL and LGPL, are not available to be incorporated.
What can the Chumby do with Audio out of the box?
That remains to be seen - what we have distributed so far have been clearly identified as prototypes and one shouldn't assume that the capabilities of the current prototypes are a definitive indication of the capabilities of the production unit, or any firmware upgrades we may release down the line.
We do understand the desire to have the chumby be a relatively rich multimedia platform, within the capabilities of the hardware, and are attempt to address that.
And as an aside...
Everyone keeps complaining about the Processor power of the ARM. What’s the problem? I used to play starcraft on a 266 and less. Does it lack a math co-processor?
As Macintosh people used to frequently point out, you can't necessarily compare the relative performance of processors based solely on the clock speed. The ARM processor was designed for low cost and power requirements. The generic ARM9 processor does not contain a floating-point math coprocessor, but some manufacturers do add them. In fact, the basic ARM9 does not even know how to divide integers - it's some through a software routine.
Typically, processors of this class are augmented by specialized processors that do the heavy lifting for certain things. For instance, very few music players use the main processor to actually decode audio - they typically have a special-purpose chip perform that operation. This is very similar to how most modern desktop machines used specialized rendering hardware built into video cards to create graphics - it's quite rare now for the main processor to draw graphics.
This is one major reason why so few music players support Ogg Vorbis - there simply aren't many, if any, inexpensive chip-level implementations, and the processors are historically too slow to decode it. It didn't help that early implementations of Vorbis required hardware floating-point.
The chumby has pretty much the highest performance we can make it in this form factor at this price point. It does not, and never will, have the performance of a general purpose computer of the same generation.
