[PLUG] mpg123 for RH 8

[Nicholas Knight]

On Tuesday 19 November 2002 02:48 pm, Richard Steffens wrote:

> Did that, but the sound quality is choppy.

As I'm not using RH, I haven't really looked into it, but apparently something 
about RH8's kernel is causing CPU usage issues with certain applications 
(mostly games, it seems). Might be related, dunno.

> Thanks for any ideas. (Suggestions that I should be using oog instead of
> mp3 are fine, but I have all these mp3 files. I'd consider switching,
> assuming that would make a difference in the quality of the sound, if
> there is a way to convert mp3 files to oog.)

If you do start moving to ogg, don't convert from mp3. There are utilities to 
do it, but both are lossy formats, and the quality will end up, at best, the 
same as the original mp3, but likely worse than if you'd left them as mp3's.

That said, ogg does produce higher quality sound at the same bitrates, if 
you're encoding straight from the source (the CD). It also uses good VBR 
techniques to further reduce filesize without sacrificing quality.

The main drawback to ogg, aside from lack of widespread adoption, is that 
current decoders are slower than those for mp3. This might be an issue 
considering you're only on a P200. Encoding is slower, too, but that's a 
one-time penalty.