[ILUG] Strange problem with oggdec, which became a question about time.

[Niall O Broin]

oggdec -o 123.wav somefile.ogg  and  oggdec -o abc.wav somefile.ogg   give you 
different wav files. abc.wav will be 44 bytes longer. If you prepend the 
first 44 bytes of abc.wav to 123.wav, 123.wav will be then identical to 
abc.wav. This is with oggdec 1.0 on SuSE 9.0. Then I tried with oggdec 1.0.1 
on a Debian unstable box. The Debian box is rather fast, so I wondered ho 
much time it would take to decode a sample ogg file. But now I'm confused. 
When I do 

time oggdec -o 123.wav dante.ogg

I get

OggDec 1.0.1
Decoding "dante.ogg" to "123.wav"
        [100.0%]

real    0m1.024s
user    0m0.815s
sys     0m0.201s

but clearly (by simple counting) the decoding takes MUCH longer than 1 second. 
I thought I'd clear matters up, and provide more grist for this question, by 
doing

date;time oggdec -o 123.wav dante.ogg;date
Wed Feb 25 00:20:35 GMT 2004
OggDec 1.0.1
Decoding "dante.ogg" to "123.wav"
        [100.0%]

real    0m1.001s
user    0m0.805s
sys     0m0.189s
Wed Feb 25 00:20:36 GMT 2004

but as you can see, that only adds to the confusion, by seeming to show that 
the decoding DID only take 1 second, although it did not. So I again did

date;time oggdec -o 123.wav dante.ogg;date
Wed Feb 25 00:22:41 GMT 2004
OggDec 1.0.1
Decoding "dante.ogg" to "123.wav"
        [100.0%]

real    0m1.042s
user    0m0.858s
sys     0m0.181s
Wed Feb 25 00:22:42 GMT 2004

and then immediately (up arrow back through bash history) did

niall at debian:~ > date
Wed Feb 25 00:22:47 GMT 2004

Seems like a question for the time lords.


-- 
Niall