3 ms·

How about decoding a high bitrate MP3 file in realtime?

by qplex 10y ago

buzzybee 10y ago
DOS programs were decoding MP3 in realtime in the mid-90's, on 90's hardware, just at lower bitrates. By 2000 it was trivially solved and filesharing over P2P was in vogue, while video still presented a major bottleneck(and it still does in many respects). The OS boot time, on the other hand, has remained more-or-less constant in all time periods, when running contemporary hardware. All of which is to say: Windows has an "accumulated cruft" problem that exists independently of what the hardware could do. The search built into Windows 10 is abysmally slow - in fact, almost every interaction with the toolbar or Explorer tends to be slow if you've installed a lot of stuff, because you oftentimes are "paying for what you don't use" when the program adds an Explorer extension, and there's a paucity of diagnostic tools to throw that fact in your face, so it just manifests as "Windows sure is slow lately". DOS doesn't have that problem because DOS does almost nothing, and cannot be extended to do more. (On that note, Windows 10 did make a major breakthrough in responsiveness: it compresses memory in inactive programs, so you hit disk much less when running and switching between lots of programs.)
- pwdisswordfish 10y ago
  > DOS does almost nothing, and cannot be extended to do more. Remember TSRs eating up precious conventional memory?
- dom0 10y ago
  > The search built into Windows 10 is abysmally slow - in fact, almost every interaction with the toolbar or Explorer tends to be slow if you've installed a lot of stuff Not just in Windows 10. The start menu search in W7 was also always absymally slow, completely independent of hardware. Even on an SSD it's unusably slow. Which I just don't understand. That thing isn't doing shit. I have literally no idea why it's this slow. I've written an equivalent of it for my Linux/i3 setup, which is completely stupid and naive (no caching at all, parses _all_ program definitions every time it's opened) and that is at least a hundred times faster. The latter is instantaneous (<10 ms on this computer), while the W7 start menu takes seconds to find anything -- on the same computer! Also, the only start menu w/ search that is comparatively slow is the Unity search. Most others are practically instantaneous (eg. KDE), even on weaker hardware...
- cr0sh 10y ago
  > DOS programs were decoding MP3 in realtime in the mid-90's, on 90's hardware, just at lower bitrates. Back "in the day" I built an AMD 5x86 machine with 4mb that ran DOS and could -just barely- decode 128K MP3s using some DOS-based MP3 player I found. On top of that, I ran a custom menu system (wrote it using TurboC iirc) that drove a 16x2 LCD via the parallel port. I had this idea that I would set it up as a car pc, but never actually did.
fsiefken 10y ago
A 486 would be capable of that... not sure about 386 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 http://web.archive.org/web/20080619002511/www.sonicspot.com/winplay/winplay.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080619002511/www.sonicspot.com/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 Appearently there is also an mplayer version for dos.. http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2009-March/076327.html http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2009-March/07632... and a mpg123 port http://www.fareham.org.uk/music/mpg123/index.shtml http://www.fareham.org.uk/music/mpg123/index.shtml So in theory you could even play small mp4 video's. Don't forget RealPlayer, it had a very efficient audio encoding for low bitrates http://www.win31.de/esoft.htm http://www.win31.de/esoft.htm - it was later open sourced and called Helix DNA producer. I think the last version supported for Windows 3.1 was RealAudio 4, even though you might get further along with the win32s setup for 3.11. There is no need though as the low bandwith encoding was the most interesting feature, with Sipro's ACELP perhaps beating even Opus (LPC based SILK or CELT) for very low bitrates < 12 Kbps and for sure beating Speex. lpcJ, 14_4: IS-54 VSELP (RealAudio 1) 28_8: G.728 LD-CELP (RealAudio 2) dnet: Dolby AC3 (RealAudio 3) sipr: Sipro Lab Telecom ACELP-NET (RealAudio 4/5)
- qplex 10y ago
  Nope. A 486 simply can not do that. Low bit rate, 22kHz mono is possible however.

How about decoding a high bitrate MP3 file in realtime?

by qplex 10y ago

How about decoding a high bitrate MP3 file in realtime?

DOS programs were decoding MP3 in realtime in the mid-90's, on 90's hardware, just at lower bitrates. By 2000 it was trivially solved and filesharing over P2P was in vogue, while video still presented a major bottleneck(and it still does in many respects). The OS boot time, on the other hand, has remained more-or-less constant in all time periods, when running contemporary hardware. All of which is to say: Windows has an "accumulated cruft" problem that exists independently of what the hardware could do. The search built into Windows 10 is abysmally slow - in fact, almost every interaction with the toolbar or Explorer tends to be slow if you've installed a lot of stuff, because you oftentimes are "paying for what you don't use" when the program adds an Explorer extension, and there's a paucity of diagnostic tools to throw that fact in your face, so it just manifests as "Windows sure is slow lately". DOS doesn't have that problem because DOS does almost nothing, and cannot be extended to do more. (On that note, Windows 10 did make a major breakthrough in responsiveness: it compresses memory in inactive programs, so you hit disk much less when running and switching between lots of programs.)

pwdisswordfish 10y ago
> DOS does almost nothing, and cannot be extended to do more. Remember TSRs eating up precious conventional memory?
dom0 10y ago
> The search built into Windows 10 is abysmally slow - in fact, almost every interaction with the toolbar or Explorer tends to be slow if you've installed a lot of stuff Not just in Windows 10. The start menu search in W7 was also always absymally slow, completely independent of hardware. Even on an SSD it's unusably slow. Which I just don't understand. That thing isn't doing shit. I have literally no idea why it's this slow. I've written an equivalent of it for my Linux/i3 setup, which is completely stupid and naive (no caching at all, parses _all_ program definitions every time it's opened) and that is at least a hundred times faster. The latter is instantaneous (<10 ms on this computer), while the W7 start menu takes seconds to find anything -- on the same computer! Also, the only start menu w/ search that is comparatively slow is the Unity search. Most others are practically instantaneous (eg. KDE), even on weaker hardware...
cr0sh 10y ago
> DOS programs were decoding MP3 in realtime in the mid-90's, on 90's hardware, just at lower bitrates. Back "in the day" I built an AMD 5x86 machine with 4mb that ran DOS and could -just barely- decode 128K MP3s using some DOS-based MP3 player I found. On top of that, I ran a custom menu system (wrote it using TurboC iirc) that drove a 16x2 LCD via the parallel port. I had this idea that I would set it up as a car pc, but never actually did.

fsiefken 10y ago

A 486 would be capable of that... not sure about 386 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 http://web.archive.org/web/20080619002511/www.sonicspot.com/winplay/winplay.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080619002511/www.sonicspot.com/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 Appearently there is also an mplayer version for dos.. http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2009-March/076327.html http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2009-March/07632... and a mpg123 port http://www.fareham.org.uk/music/mpg123/index.shtml http://www.fareham.org.uk/music/mpg123/index.shtml So in theory you could even play small mp4 video's. Don't forget RealPlayer, it had a very efficient audio encoding for low bitrates http://www.win31.de/esoft.htm http://www.win31.de/esoft.htm - it was later open sourced and called Helix DNA producer. I think the last version supported for Windows 3.1 was RealAudio 4, even though you might get further along with the win32s setup for 3.11. There is no need though as the low bandwith encoding was the most interesting feature, with Sipro's ACELP perhaps beating even Opus (LPC based SILK or CELT) for very low bitrates < 12 Kbps and for sure beating Speex. lpcJ, 14_4: IS-54 VSELP (RealAudio 1) 28_8: G.728 LD-CELP (RealAudio 2) dnet: Dolby AC3 (RealAudio 3) sipr: Sipro Lab Telecom ACELP-NET (RealAudio 4/5)

qplex 10y ago
Nope. A 486 simply can not do that. Low bit rate, 22kHz mono is possible however.