Thanks for bringing up this aspect, Nicholas. I seem to recall that specific hardware has a problem with certain compression levels, but I cannot recall whether that was limited to just encoding, or decoding as well. It could very well be true that I am conflating my vague memory of encoder limitations with decoder limitations.
It does seem to be that the oppo BDP-95 is exhibiting problems with particular flac files. Since my original message, my friend has installed the latest version of flac and recompressed the exact files that were giving him a problem before - now with -0 or --fast he doesn't see a playback problem at all. So, even though your statements make total sense to me, the evidence seems to indicate something about the compressed data that's causing a problem. The original audio is not the issue, but how it is compressed. Here's a thought: Since the encoder looks for polynomials, could it be possible that certain decoders cannot handle certain polynomials in real time? Ah, another possibility is that the oppo BDP-95 implements an older version of the decoder, and it's merely new flac files that give it a headache. My friend happened to have an old version of flac installed on his computer, 1.1.4, and that reported stream errors with his files until he upgraded to 1.2.1 - if the oppo has anything older than 1.2.1 then I suppose that might explain the decoding problems. Brian On Feb 5, 2011, at 16:33, Nicholas Wilson wrote: > Correct me if wrong, but I was under the impression that the > processing required for playback was totally independent on the > level of compression. The encoder looks for polynomials that fit, > and it takes much more processing to find polynomials with a very > good fit and small residuals. On the other hand, the decoder just > has to multiply out the stored prediction, which is independent of > the compression level. > > Nicholas _______________________________________________ Flac mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac
