[Sunhelp] MP3 Player using an LX

[Thomas Reagan]

I use my SparcStation 5 for this purpose, mounting the mp3s using sharity
(an SMB/CIFS program similar to samba, but precompiled and supporting
NFS-style mounts under Solaris which are normally only available on Linux).
It worked great using mpg123, but lately I have been using xaudio
(www.xaudio.com), which claims to be lower usage intensive.

Quick tests show xaudio using 5-10% less cpu on the machine than mpg123,
which may be what is necessary.  Rxaudio also offers a convenient interface
for developing front-ends, esp. remote ones.  I intend to use it for a
similar project on a PC set-top box called the WebSurfer.

Hope that this helps.

tkr

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sunhelp-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:sunhelp-admin at sunhelp.org]On
> Behalf Of James Lockwood
> Sent: Tuesday, May 09, 2000 3:23 PM
> To: sunhelp at sunhelp.org
> Subject: Re: [Sunhelp] MP3 Player using an LX
>
>
> On Tue, 9 May 2000, Doug McLaren wrote:
>
> > I tried the same thing and had the same results - the LX is just not
> > quite fast enough to play your standard mp3's without
> losing quality.
> >
> > So, unless we can find a more efficient mp3 player (or optimize
> > mpg123) or we add some sort of hardware decoder (unlikely) it's just
> > not going to work.
>
> Have you tried Sun showmetv?  It's actually quite light
> CPU-wise though a
> bit bare on features.
>
> > Actually, it's possible (but unlikely) that Sparc Linux is a bit
> > faster than Solaris on that box, and that it could play it without
> > downsampling.  It's a long shot, but maybe it's worth a try.
>
> You're CPU bound, not kernel bound.  Faster codecs are the only things
> that will help, and Sparc Linux audio support is marginal.
>
> If you've got enough CPU but interrupts from other programs
> are killing
> you, try using dispadmin to decrease the size of the
> timeslices used by
> the scheduler.  Going to the RT time class may help as well.
>
> Have you tried seeing how fast mpg123 can decode straight to
> a file?  If
> you can get it any faster than 176K/s then throwing in a ring
> buffer on
> the audio output will help.
>
> -James
>
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