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If only Opus (codec) was a thing at that time, could have put some music at a relatively recent quality without using a lot of storage.

by m-p-3 7y ago

derefr 7y ago
Which is kind of like saying “if only we had H.265, VCDs could have been high-quality.” We certainly could have invented the codec back then (maybe, if we had had a few more genius information-theory mathematicians born the years before), but could we have implemented it in silicon with 1990s tech, with an affordable power budget (e.g. two AA batteries)?
- pjc50 7y ago
  Spoiler: no, there wasn't enough CPU power for a more complicated codec. I had a Toshiba Libretto 30 with a 486 processor and PCMCIA soundcard. It could play MP3s .. but only with the Fraunhofer codec, Winamp required slightly more than 100% CPU.
  - derefr 7y ago
    That’s assuming you ran the codec on the CPU. We had codec-accelerator ASICs back then! MP3 players and DVD players were famously built on such ASICs. For a long time, the MPEG-2 decoder ASICs required for DVD playback were a differentiator on video cards and motherboards, allowing some PCs to offer DVD playback long before consumer CPUs were capable of realtime 480p MPEG-2 decoding. (E.g. the original iMac offered DVD playback through such an ASIC.) The real questions in this hypothetical are: 1. if we handed the netlist for a modern H.265 codec ASIC to a 1990s fab, would they have been able to print it? (Maybe.) 2. Would the resulting chip have made H.265 a worthwhile encoding for shipping media in the 1990s? (Nah; the chip, as rendered at a ~100nm process node, probably would have been ridiculously power-hungry and hot. It would have worked out in a server with blower fans, or in a gaming PC with a powerful PSU and a water-cooling rig dedicated to the ASIC; but you couldn’t have put one in a piece of consumer electronics like the PlayStation 1. As such, its use, if anything, would only be studio-internal, maybe for archival storage of masters in a “nearly-losslessly-compressed” form.)

If only Opus (codec) was a thing at that time, could have put some music at a relatively recent quality without using a lot of storage.

by m-p-3 7y ago

If only Opus (codec) was a thing at that time, could have put some music at a relatively recent quality without using a lot of storage.

derefr 7y ago

Which is kind of like saying “if only we had H.265, VCDs could have been high-quality.” We certainly could have invented the codec back then (maybe, if we had had a few more genius information-theory mathematicians born the years before), but could we have implemented it in silicon with 1990s tech, with an affordable power budget (e.g. two AA batteries)?

pjc50 7y ago
Spoiler: no, there wasn't enough CPU power for a more complicated codec. I had a Toshiba Libretto 30 with a 486 processor and PCMCIA soundcard. It could play MP3s .. but only with the Fraunhofer codec, Winamp required slightly more than 100% CPU.
- derefr 7y ago
  That’s assuming you ran the codec on the CPU. We had codec-accelerator ASICs back then! MP3 players and DVD players were famously built on such ASICs. For a long time, the MPEG-2 decoder ASICs required for DVD playback were a differentiator on video cards and motherboards, allowing some PCs to offer DVD playback long before consumer CPUs were capable of realtime 480p MPEG-2 decoding. (E.g. the original iMac offered DVD playback through such an ASIC.) The real questions in this hypothetical are: 1. if we handed the netlist for a modern H.265 codec ASIC to a 1990s fab, would they have been able to print it? (Maybe.) 2. Would the resulting chip have made H.265 a worthwhile encoding for shipping media in the 1990s? (Nah; the chip, as rendered at a ~100nm process node, probably would have been ridiculously power-hungry and hot. It would have worked out in a server with blower fans, or in a gaming PC with a powerful PSU and a water-cooling rig dedicated to the ASIC; but you couldn’t have put one in a piece of consumer electronics like the PlayStation 1. As such, its use, if anything, would only be studio-internal, maybe for archival storage of masters in a “nearly-losslessly-compressed” form.)