On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 14:20 -0700, bmearns wrote:
> I think I may have misused the term "file stream", I just meant that I don't
> need code to actually read in the file from any particular source. Assume
> I'm able to send the file's byte to the decoding funciton.
> 
> As far as feasability...I didn't think that would even be an issue. Perhaps
> I mistakingly assumed that an iPod and other portable audio players were
> using something comparable to a dsPIC (comparable in terms of performance).
> I don't believe they use dedicated MP3-decoder IPs because they support
> multiple audio formats, so I can only assume the decoding is done in a
> micro. But again, I may have underestimated the speed of those processors,
> or perhaps they're more finely tuned to that kind of calculation.

MP3 decoding is NOT trivial. To put things in perspective, back in the
day I had a Pentium 75, and it could not do MP3 decoding flawlessly in
real time. In DOS it was OK, but running windows while playing an MP3
was out of the question.

As for iPods and things like that, I'd assume a good portion of what's
done in MP3/WMA/AAC decoding is done in hardware. Perhaps not the WHOLE
process, but the major computational bits. 

TTYL

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