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Comment by lesscraft | original | FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder
[−]lesscraft · 2026-07-01 Wed 18:41 UTC · link
No one really offloads AAC, apart from Apple. Opus can be decoded on very cheap microcontrollers entirely in software using the reference library.
[−]philistine · 2026-07-01 Wed 22:47 UTC · link
On a microcontroller doing nothing else sure. But on a phone, a tablet, a laptop, you absolutely want hardware decode to preserve your battery life.
[−]nulld3v · 2026-07-02 Thu 01:45 UTC · link
That's their point though. Basically no modern phone/laptop/tablet other than Apple offloads audio decoding (of any codec) to hardware. You can check this on Android phones by installing the Codec Info app.
[−]cogman10 · 2026-07-02 Thu 03:01 UTC · link
Audio decode is extremely cheap. It's true that a hardware implementation will be more efficient, but really not a whole lot more.
[−]AnggaSP · 2026-07-02 Thu 05:29 UTC · link
There absolutely does, Android did with low power audio. They even goes a step further by offloading bluetooth processing into DSP.

I’m not in this space anymore but as of Android 5-6 era aac and bt is offloaded to hexagon dsp on qualcomm device.