You can’t really test by looking at the before and after battery percentages, since they extremely inaccurate. You need to run the battery down for each format and time how long it takes (recording the output on a PC is an easy way to do that), or else use a DMM to measure power consumption directly.
Quite true, it’s meant nothing more than a rough guide. But, when you get near double the drain showing, the results are pretty conclusive.
I looked for previous info, didn’t find anything - I wouldn’t have bothered with this otherwise. It was just a warning (and hopefully a confirmation from others) that the advertised support for Vorbis is complete rubbish. If the products battery life is around a third for one of the formats due to poor implementation of the decoder, you can’t advertise ‘support’ for the format (well, fair enough if they had made the problem clear on the box).
“partially Sandisk’s fault” ? No, it’s entirely Sandisk’s fault (from a customer’s point of view). If they want to buy (hell, they ain’t even paying for it here) a piece of software and proceed to sell on to the end user it is entirely their responsibility to make sure it’s up to scratch. I can’t go to the Tremor developers and request a refund for a faulty product, I can go to Sandisk under warranty or the retailer.
When designing electronics I don’t throw in any old component that fits the rough description, I look for something that does the job properly - if it doesn’t exist on the market, I design in the discrete equivalent or get a contractor to do it. Either way, the end product is wholly my responsibility and I make damned sure it works.
Further to this, if this is a common problem, why is Sandisk Customer ‘Support’ taking two days to reply to every e-mail, and feeding me ■■■■ about it ‘just being a one off problem and I should get a request unit’? Frankly, they are an offensive bunch of thieves who want to use us as nothing but cash cows to be milked dry. Another supplier I won’t be touching from now on. It sickens me that this list is now so long.
Thanks for the info you have provided, please don’t think the above is aimed at you. It’s a rant at the sick state most modern companies are in.
“Eventually I want to put the Rockbox Tremor optimizations back into main Tremor so commercial devices decode Vorbis efficiently”
Sounds like you are an open source developer? For this I salute you and thank you. One of the last small pockets of people who are still out there trying to better things and doing it for no better reason than that ‘they can’.
