Re: is it true mp3 use less battery on portables than wma?

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I was going to post that this is easily tested with a VOM but, as you said, it really isn't. Current draw in the player is instantaneously dependant on the content being played. It would take sophisticated logging and analysis to come up with the total power used while playing some common and significantly long collection of media. And any two batteries are going to have different performance characteristics so you can't play said collection and then measure remaining available power under a more static load.

Any assumptive answers to the OP's question would also depend on the hardware used for decoding either or both formats. While one may argue that WMV takes some more processing cycles (based on what, I don't know except in DRM'd WMV you might assume the decrypting takes some cycles), you still cannot make assumptions about power efficiency because the hardware for decoding the MP3 may be much more inefficient. How could anyone other than an engineer with in-depth knowledge of the internal design of the chip know?

If I wanted a definitive answer and didn't have the skills to make such a test myself, I would not go to Microsoft for the answer, I'd go to the manufacturer of the MP3 player. How could Microsoft answer that question?


Dale

"Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media]" <neil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:fgdgt25ghl5bq94em6ncfq2gm356vhkbr5@xxxxxxxxxx
On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 22:32:05 -0800, abdul h
<abdulh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

is it true mp3 use less battery on portables than wma?
i want microsoft staff answer my question.i want reasons of your answers
too.thanks :)


Microsoft staff don't hang out here, sorry.

In reply to your question, the answer *of course* is "it depends"


There's no official measure (or rating) of power usage for portable
devices in the same way mains powered devices might in some countries.
The EU for example has power efficiency codes for fridges and other
large domestic appliances, but not for mobile phones or PDAs or MP3
players.

The concept of power efficiency depends on a lot of factors such as
screen brightness, age of the batteries and many other things. So in
general, audio decoding power usage is not measured because other
factors which would swamp that measurement to "background noise".

A few devices do indicate in their product manuals how long you can
expect audio to playback for, but very few distinguish between
playback formats since audio is so much less demanding to decode than
video (and has much less variation in decode processing needed)

Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2007
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs

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