ogg vorbis DAP battery life Options

[lordearl]

Hi Guys,

Just got a new Trekstor Vibez and wondering whether to load it with .ogg or .mp3.

Only thing is - posts from around 2003 & 2004 seem to state that whilst OGG sounds better, it chews the battery life real fast.

Is this still the case?

Cheers!

[kornchild2002]

OGG also did this with my short-lived Rio Karma. It was slated to get 12 hours (or 14 hours) of battery life when playing back mp3 files. It would get about 8 hours when using OGG. This is still the case as OGG requires more processing power to playback the files.

That is why I switched to the Lame mp3 encoder all those years ago (back in 2003) and have stuck with it ever since. Lame still provides very good results but does not require all that much processing power to play the files back. You also get the added benefit that mp3 is the "universal" lossy file format as pretty much every DAP (digital audio player) under the sun supports mp3 while few natively support OGG.

[Scarpad]

OGG also did this with my short-lived Rio Karma. It was slated to get 12 hours (or 14 hours) of battery life when playing back mp3 files. It would get about 8 hours when using OGG. This is still the case as OGG requires more processing power to playback the files.

That is why I switched to the Lame mp3 encoder all those years ago (back in 2003) and have stuck with it ever since. Lame still provides very good results but does not require all that much processing power to play the files back. You also get the added benefit that mp3 is the "universal" lossy file format as pretty much every DAP (digital audio player) under the sun supports mp3 while few natively support OGG.

I agree I was Using Ogg, then WMA, but last year went to Lame-Extreme mode VBR and I like the sound I'm hearing and it definately is easier on the Battery.

[Mr Bungle]

My iRiver iHP-120 (Rockboxed or otherwise) lasts for a very long time with ogg. I rarely use mp3 so can't compare, but the ogg battery life is more than acceptable on this DAP.

[Soap]

Seeing as this is a forum for objectivists, I will talk about my objective tests.
Rockbox, iPod 5th Gen, I encoded the same album with LAME APS and OGG Q 6.99 (found through testing) so that bitrates were identical.

While MP3 showed about 5% longer runtime through repeated tests, I feel this number is insignificant as the 90%-10% battery discharge numbers indicate only a 1% runtime benefit for MP3.
Scroll to the bottom for my runtime tests

I have no reason to doubt the anecdotal numbers Karma owners have reported, but at least with Rockbox on ARM targets, you should expect no runtime differences.

This post has been edited by Soap: Feb 24 2007, 21:10