PhatBox Ogg/Vorbis support notes

PhatBox Ogg/Vorbis support is in progress. Before it becomes an official feature, the testing versions will be available here. To install Ogg support on your PhatBox, unzip this oggplay zip file into your PHTSYS partition, over-writing any existing files. If you re-update your firmware, you may have to also re-install Ogg. New firmware comes with oggplay, so check the PHTSYS partition before re-installing this oggplay.

oggplay 0.5 (11 Aug 2003) If this is newer than your firmware, install this over the existing oggplay files.
This adds five configuration options to phatbox.ini:

vorbis_max_ha_bitrate=275000
This set the maximum bitrate used by the "high accuracy" decoder. Otherwise the "low accuracy" decoder will be used. 275000 is the default value.
decoder_preread=400
At startup, read N kB of data from the file into the Linux kernel buffers. This provides moderate skip prevention, and is fairly quick. The default is 400.
decoder_prebuff=5
The player will buffer N * 4kB of decoded PCM data on startup before playback. This provides excellent skip prevention, but is slow. The default is 5.
vorbis_eof_buf_secs=1
The number of seconds the player will leave in the kernel buffer after the end of the track. Increasing this will help prevent skips in the next song, but the audible track change will occur after the head unit registers the change, and the head unit time counter will be off. The default is 1.
vorbis_cache_whole_file=on
If there is enough RAM, the whole file will be read into memory before playback. This will work for files up to about 8M. Because of this, the audio playback will not begin until a few seconds after the track has started.

ScorLibran did some extensive testing, and found the following values worked best for him:

vorbis_max_ha_bitrate=64000
vorbis_cache_whole_file=off
decoder_preread=400
decoder_prebuff=5
vorbis_eof_buf_secs=3
This is available thanks to Xiph.org who provide the "Tremor" libraries under a BSD license.

If you have the PhatNoise Music Manager version 2.20 or later, you can enable copying Ogg files to the DMS with a registry key. Just add the DWORD reg key "OGGSupportDMS" to HKLM/Software/PhatNoise/PhatMan, and set it to 1.

Otherwise, you will have to manually add them, follow the old directions for FLAC files found here if you have trouble figuring it out.

This is an beta version and has several limitations:

vince@sixpak.org