[petsfed]

Think about the device that is performing the decoding.

At its core, It's an ultra-low-power microcontroller, and the low-power requirements to hit the battery life specification while maintaining audio quality may or may not allow the kind of software abstractions that make these codecs "just software". Once you've licensed the codec, you then have to implement it on the micro's architecture, in a way that's actually performant. Which in turn may or may not require actual Assembly work.

[rale00]

You wouldn't be implementing anything in software. The hardware would have decoding built in, so it's really just a question of choosing a bluetooth audio soc with the codecs you want and paying the licensing fees.

[petsfed]

I didn't know that codec handling was done at the hardware level. Interesting.

So the underlying idea of my post ("you can't just add new codecs in software") is ultimately correct, but for reasons completely unrelated to what I mentioned. That is, I'm wrong, but sort of stumbled into the right answer. Doubly interesting.

Now I have a ton of questions about how bluetooth audio is produced on the phone side, so that headphones only have to decode one (or a few) codec on the other side.

[abdullahkhalids]

Thanks for explaining.