Comment by philistine
5 hours ago
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.
5 hours ago
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.