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Topic: Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED (Read 104351 times) previous topic - next topic
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Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #50 –
Quote from: Woodinville on
Quote from: Gabriel on

Wma std has a very good performance, compared to iTunes, especially considering that theorically, there is nothing in the wma std format that would provide better efficiency than AAC-LC.



Out of curiousity, how do you know that, and could you direct me to the documentation?


There's a reverse-engineerd decoder in the ffdshow project.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #51 –
Quote from: Woodinville on
Quote from: Gabriel on

Wma std has a very good performance, compared to iTunes, especially considering that theorically, there is nothing in the wma std format that would provide better efficiency than AAC-LC.

Out of curiousity, how do you know that, and could you direct me to the documentation?

Don't worry, there is no leaked wmaV2 documentation (to my knowledge). However, we have a decoder (as mentionned by Garf) source code available in ffmpeg, which is enough to know about the format features.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #53 –
Quote from: Junon on
I agree to that guess, especially in the case of aoTuV beta 5. After the codec's release I ABXed a few samples to find a bitrate that suits my portable player. Although my hearing's untrained (haven't done much ABXing so far) it wasn't too hard to distinguish the 48 kbps samples from the original ones. But I already was in serious trouble hearing differences between most 64 kbps samples and the .wav source files, which led me to the decision to choose this bitrate for the portable player. Too bad I don't have the logs anymore, they would have been good examples to see the improvements in quality from the -q-1 to -q0 step.

If "Quality0" is compared with "Quality-1", there is a very big difference in impulse sound.
It influences the quantity of pre/post echo.

The greatest cause of the difference is in block(window) size.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #54 –
Aoyumi, do you have plans to continue tuning the low bitrate range? I would especially like to see improvements to q0 and q-1, so it can be even more competitive with HE-AAC. Or is it not possible for Vorbis to really compete with SBR at this bitrate range?

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #55 –
My conclusion are that Voirbis has good performances (that borders M$-WMA), it's open source and royalty-free: finally the codec to choice !

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #56 –
Vorbis has another advantage: while other codecs (see HE-AAC and LC-AAC) are good only in a certain bitrate range, Vorbis work very well from low to high bitrate. And has also a good support on portable player.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #57 –
SBR is merely a tool in AAC, so I wouldn't call HE-AAC a different codec than LC-AAC for example.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #58 –
Quote from: Firon on
do you have plans to continue tuning the low bitrate range?
For the moment, I am continuing it.
Quote
I would especially like to see improvements to q0 and q-1, so it can be even more competitive with HE-AAC. Or is it not possible for Vorbis to really compete with SBR at this bitrate range?
There is no clear answer.
I like Vorbis most generally in 64kbps range at present. Therefore, for me, Vorbis is competitive enough.  I don't know whether Vorbis will become competitive for you.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #59 –
Quote from: Firon on
Aoyumi, do  you have plans to continue tuning the low bitrate range? I would  especially like to see improvements to q0 and q-1, so it can be even  more competitive with HE-AAC. Or is it not possible for Vorbis to  really compete with SBR at this bitrate range?

 
  The question is in what way you want it to be more competitive with  HE-AAC. If it's only quality-wise, then HE-AAC will most certainly keep  being supreme in the, let's say, < 80 kbps bitrate range. That's  mainly due to SBR's ability to reproduce high frequencies which have  been cut off during the encoding process. Since Vorbis doesn't feature  any comparable technique it's the clear loser in this case. Hence I  deem it quite impossible that Vorbis will ever be able to compete with  HE-AAC in low-bitrate listening tests like this one.
 
  But nonetheless, in my opinion Vorbis is very competitive to HE-AAC  concerning both codecs' use in practice. Low bitrates like 48/64/80  kbps are common to be used on hardware players equipped with memory  sticks. And these usually rely on rechargable batteries which heavily  suffer from SBR's power appetite. The question is whether the few extra  songs, that can be squeezed on the device using extra-low bitrates in  conjunction with SBR, are worth the additional draining of the  expensive battery's life. For me it's a clear "no", I prefer encoding  to LC-AAC/Vorbis at slightly higher bitrates instead. Therefore I  wouldn't make use of an SBR-like implementation for Vorbis at all.
 
  But of course, HE-AAC's a real help concerning streaming in conjunction  with low-bandwidth as well as volume-restricted internet connections.  For this kind of use there's no single codec that can compete with it.
 
  Besides, are there any reliable data sheets about SBR's actual power  hunger? Using Google I only stumble across some mostly outdated press  releases and Gabriel's almost  ancient article about MP3Pro which aren't really suitable to be used as sources for my claims  about SBR's power consumption.

PS: At least there's a SBR-LP (Low Power) mode available, as mentioned in this article. Too bad there aren't any actual figures to be found.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #60 –
Quote from: Junon on
The question is whether the few extra  songs, that can be squeezed on the device using extra-low bitrates in  conjunction with SBR, are worth the additional draining of the  expensive battery's life. For me it's a clear "no",


only if you ignore the fact that reading more data eats batteries, too.

Quote
Besides, are there any reliable data sheets about SBR's actual power  hunger? Using Google I only stumble across some mostly outdated press  releases and Gabriel's almost  ancient article about MP3Pro which aren't really suitable to be used as sources for my claims  about SBR's power consumption.

PS: At least there's a SBR-LP (Low Power) mode available, as mentioned in this article. Too bad there aren't any actual figures to be found.


https://datatype.helixcommunity.org/2005/aacfixptdec

These are older figures, claimed by Real. They claim 52Mhz ARM9E to decode stereo HE-AAC (using full, not using low power, decoding). I know that 128kbps Vorbis takes 40Mhz on the same chip (using Tremor).

Note that most devices which actually have HE-AAC support have hardware, or at least DSP assitance for the decoding.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #61 –
Quote from: Garf on
https://datatype.helixcommunity.org/2005/aacfixptdec

These are older figures, claimed by Real. They claim 52Mhz ARM9E to decode stereo HE-AAC (using full, not using low power, decoding). I know that 128kbps Vorbis takes 40Mhz on the same chip (using Tremor).

Note that most devices which actually have HE-AAC support have hardware, or at least DSP assitance for the decoding.


A lot more hungry than LC-AAC, but also way more bearable in comparison to Vorbis than I imagined it to be. Thanks for the input, it changed my opinion about HE-AAC quite a bit.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #62 –
Quote from: Firon on
Aoyumi, do you have plans to continue tuning the low bitrate range? I would especially like to see improvements to q0 and q-1, so it can be even more competitive with HE-AAC. Or is it not possible for Vorbis to really compete with SBR at this bitrate range?


A way to improve Vorbis at all bitrate would be to use rehuff. Rehuff is a tool to losslessly recompress data of a Vorbis file. Unfortunately the last version was buggy: was able to lossless reduce file size, but generated wrong packet giving problem with seek.

More info here:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/vorbis-dev...ust/018522.html

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #63 –
The test results don't suprise me.  But with everything I've read about wma10, I would have half-expected it to be closer to HE-AAC.

Quote from: Firon on
I would especially like to see improvements to q0 and q-1, so it can be even more competitive with HE-AAC. Or is it not possible for Vorbis to really compete with SBR at this bitrate range?
IMO q0 has been at least on par with HE-AAC at 64kbps for quite a few years.. just have to move up the lowpass a little bit  .. not so much with any negative quality value though.
Vorbis-q0-lowpass99
lame3.93.1-q5-V9-k-nspsytune

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #64 –
q0 is not quite on par with HE-AAC. It's clearly worse on most songs, even with a raised lowpass. It's not that bad, but it's certainly not as good either.
 

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #65 –
Edit:
@mods: This entry can be deleted.

I commented on
Quote from: Gabriel on
Wma std has a very good performance, compared to iTunes, especially considering that theorically, there is nothing in the wma std format that would provide better efficiency than AAC-LC.

saying that WMA Std uses VQ but verified later that it does not (wmadec.c, wmadata.h). I guess I mistook the tables for LSP values for VQ tables.

Multiformat Listening Test @ 48 kbps - FINISHED

Reply #66 –
Thanks for the test!
My ego got beaten another time as it was hard for my untrained ears to distinguish most codecs at half of the samples.
I wasn't even able to distinguish the low anchor at one sample.
Some other, pre-echo prone samples were quite obvious while I could barely hear other artifacts.

Guess I should get a fresh pair of ears for the next test