On Saturday 06 March 2004 09:15 am, Todd Slater wrote: > > Proving once again that good help is hard to find! ;-) > > According to those pages, then, the cd-based players iMP250+ have the > firmware upgrade, but it's beta and works with oggs encoded up to > 168kbs. The player may choke or skip parts if the bit rate exceeds that, > which is possible with VBR encoding. > > Maybe the tech support guy responded the way he did since to play oggs > would involve updating the firmware and using a beta product? Anyhow, if > anybody here can report on performance that would be great. > I have found the US website is often at least 1 and sometimes 2 firmware revs behind the International site. All the new stuff will show up first on the international site, so hang out there.
Anyway, I have been using this firmware with my iMP-350 for the last couple of weeks using oggs encoded at 128kbps and the performance is outstanding. No skipping at all. I did have some problems with my ogg library. There were a lot of artifacts even though the bit rate was within spec. I think the problem had to do with them being encoded with a beta version of oggenc, as they were originally ripped and encoded about 18 months ago. If the decoder in the firmware is written very efficiently to fit in the limited flash rom and is based on the current spec, then it probably cannot deal with the small differences in the ogg files made with older versions of the encoder. The software decoders in the media players probably have some code to correct for this since their memory footprint is not so limited. I re-encoding the same disks with the oggenc in Mandrake 10 and it eliminated the problem. HTH -- /g
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