Comment by lesscraft
9 hours ago
No one really offloads AAC, apart from Apple. Opus can be decoded on very cheap microcontrollers entirely in software using the reference library.
9 hours ago
No one really offloads AAC, apart from Apple. Opus can be decoded on very cheap microcontrollers entirely in software using the reference library.
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.
Audio decode is extremely cheap. It's true that a hardware implementation will be more efficient, but really not a whole lot more.
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.