Matej Kupljen wrote:
Hi
I've built soft float toolchain (with crosstool) and then build
MPlayer with it. The performance is very low. I cannot even play the
mp3 file with MPlayer on DBAU1200 with 400MHz CPU!
[...]
Any other suggestions?
I'm not sure what you are doing, but if you only want to play music,
I'd use Ogg Vorbis instead, which has a decoder that only uses integer
arithmetic for exactly the case of FPU-less machines and the Au1200.
I could also imagine an MP3 decoder written for integer only being
written somewhere, but I don't know anything about it.
Yes, I can use madplay (libmad) for music only, which uses int
arithmetics (also special version for MIPS).
But I also want to play video and currently I am testing this with
MPlayer (maybe I'll add support for MAE, sometime in the future).
Then I found out, that MPlayer can use libmad for MP3 and it
works great know.
We are using libmad and can play 128kbps MP3s on a mips 300MHz 4kc code
with about 10-15% CPU utilization.
However I think anything but very low resolution low frame rate video is
out of the question. You need several orders of magnitude more
processing power to make it work. All of the MIPS based video systems
that I am aware of (TiVo, Sony and Samsung HDTVs etc.) have dedicated
hardware video decoders. There are people talking about doing the
decoding purely in software, but they would be using something with the
processing power of a 2GHz Pentium4 with special DSP extensions. As far
as I know these are just paper designs and are not yet in production.
I guess what I am trying to say is that even if you could make the soft
float library four times faster, you would still be no where close to
being able to decode video.
I declare it impossible, but encourage you to prove me wrong.
David Daney.
