Skip to content

Comment on Shine: A super fast fixed-point MP3 encoderparent

Comments

Ah yes, should have guessed. WMA was pretty big in the early 2000s. Around 2004 I even had access to the official wma source from Microsoft.

Spent about 4 months porting and then optimizing the wma decoder on a proprietary very-low-power dsp. It was hard work, but I got it down to about 12mhz for real-time decode on the dsp. The product this was intended for was going to be powered by a watch battery - hence the extreme optimization requirement. The source code, as received, used to consume ~400mhz on an athlon iirc. But with a lot of assistance from the dsp hardware and 4 months of elbow grease it could decode in less than 12mhz - for some profiles. Insane codebase!

Ah, I would have loved to see that. Never got to, even though I was a Windows Media MVP, I was NDA'd to the Moon, and I was the main tech guy in exec level meetings at Microsoft about Windows Media and the company I was working for was probably the biggest user of WMA in the world.

I wonder if the decoder source is in the Windows source code leaks? I guess Windows Media Player source will be in there. That'd be worth a look for me to see how utterly horrible it actually was.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.