Comment by philistine
8 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.
8 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.
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.
Audio decode is extremely cheap. It's true that a hardware implementation will be more efficient, but really not a whole lot more.