Sounds like the best of all worlds, even "low power consumption" !

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/it...d-1705078.html

It appears the version of FFMPEG in the fremantle repos lacks Opus support

Based on the age of the mplayer version it's unlikely mplayer has support either.

Would it be a big job for the fremantle mplayer and ffmpeg maintainers to compile a more recent version of mplayer for ARM with the Opus support?

I'm not a developer, but ffmpeg has a --maemo option for configure, when compiling it, so it might be as simple as using that when compiling it.

It's very interesting, especially, that it's royalty-free, XIPH Foundation's project:
https://xiph.org

...not some "wishful thinking", proprietary hype. It seems, that widespread adoption - like with .ogg and .flac - is just a matter of (short) time.

For sure, there are no chances for hardware acceleration, but no reasons why it shouldn't work as good as .ogg and .flac does, on Maemo. Sounds like support for it in Maemo would be nice task for CSSU?

/Estel

yep it seems to be a very good codec. No obvious advantage for a music library, but very good for streaming music. Apparently it's also not too heavy to decompress, so probably useful even without hw acceleration.

The codec software is already packaged for Debian wheezy as "opus-tools". The first step would surely be to compile the sources of that for harmattan and put it in the community repository.

I'd love to transcode my call recordings to opus.

opus-tools includes opusdec and opusenc, so actually one would only need frontends to use them, if that.

The CLI tools would be fine for me. I'm on Fremantle. Hopefully all the dependencies exist.

I'm not overly familiar with compiling stuff for N900 (beyond a bit of mucking around with MADDE and Scratchbox). Does it tend to be a lot of work?

@Xagoln:
It might be sufficient to decrease the version numbers of libc6 and libgcc1 in the dependencies of Debian Wheezy's opus-tools to get it running under Fremantle. All other dependencies are either met by Fremantle or can be installed directly from Debian.

If that doesn't work you could use opus-tools via Easy Debian (e.g. Estel's Wheezy image).

Edit:
I just tried to get Wheezy's opus-tools running natively on my N900 but both the encoder and the decoder didn't run due to unmet library symbols.
So just tinkering with the control files and installing the Debian packages isn't enough. It will have to be compiled properly.
But given how long transcoding takes even on my Desktop computer I wouldn't want to do this on my N900.