[Updated 1:00pm PDT] — (press release excerpt) — theKompany and Xiph.org have teamed up to bring Ogg Vorbis to the Sharp Zaurus. The result of this collaboration is the newly released tkcPlayer, the first audio playback application that supports playback of Ogg… Vorbis files on the Sharp Zaurus. In addition to playing mp3 files, this application is the first of any kind to play Ogg Vorbis files on a handheld computer.

“This is very exciting news,” said Xiph.org Foundation CEO Emmett Plant. “At least once a day, I get a note from someone that says they want to play Ogg Vorbis files on a handheld computer, and this team-up with theKompany has finally made it happen.”

Part of the puzzle of getting proper playback on a small device was Tremor, the Xiph.org Foundation's Ogg Vorbis fixed-point decoder.

“We spent a lot of time working on Tremor, and we're glad that it's being implemented by theKompany. When theKompany agreed to license Tremor from us, I knew that they would come up with a fantastic application that looks and works just as well as Ogg Vorbis sounds. We're very happy with tkcPlayer.”

“I've been fascinated by the Ogg Vorbis project since the beginning,” said theKompany CEO Shawn Gordon. “When the Zaurus came out, I made it a personal mission to have Ogg playback ability on it, but was frustrated when we ran into fixed point decoding issues that made it impractical to release. By chance, the CEO of Xiph showed up in IRC just as I was in total despair of an answer, and as though sent from heaven, Emmett arrived with an answer.”

“We were able to work a deal, get what we needed, and deploy our code within two days, which might be a record in the business world. I'm thrilled to be part of the release of the world's first portable Ogg Vorbis player in the Sharp Zaurus.”

The Xiph.org Foundation is a Delaware company that produces and maintains Ogg Vorbis, a patent-free audio compression codec.

tkcPlayer for the Zaurus is available for $9.95 from theKompany's website.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.