Hello, I apologize if this has been answered. couldn't find it when searching.
With the Extra Decoders Support package, I can play my .ogg audio files, however the battery drain is considerable. when displaying processes with the top command, i see the cpu gets bogged down to 50%. The n900 gets warm and drains fast.
I've installed mplayer and kmplayer, and when playing music on kmplayer using mplayer as the selected player, cpu utilization is around 10%.
Is there a solution for the battery drain with the regular media player? can I force it to use mplayer and if so how? are there any differences in sound quality between mplayer and the regular osso codecs?
After having had a quick look on the Wikipedia page for Vorbis, I'd say that something like Tremor (fixed point arithmetic implementation) mixed with Lancer (platform specific SIMD instruction implementation) would be the best bet.
That'd make it, I'd guess, the easiest to get something that could use the DSP to decode the audio, moving computation away from the CPU. This would give more decoded data per cycle spent and thus giving better battery time.
There might already be such an implementation out there, since the OMAP3 is used by so many, but I haven't taken the time to look for it.
If the oggvorbis library that "Extra decoders" supplies is the reference implementation from Xiph.org, it will be all CPU bound (as far as I can tell) and it will make your CPU very busy, resulting in the drain you've observed.
Found in another forum than Extra codecs are bad for battery life - media indexing requires also more CPU.
Have you tested MediaBox ? Really a great app.
