[gst-devel] building an AC3 decoder...

[Jan Schmidt]

<quote who="Darrell Berry">
> a) has anyone already done the hard work of building a gstreamer-based 
> patch which takes AC3 in and rects it out to 6 (5.1) or more (7.2?) 
> discrete channels on a multi-port audio card using Jack?

There's the a52dec element, which decodes ac3 using liba52. At the moment
though, it only decodes to a stereo signal. We're still finalising how
we're going to handle 5.1 channel sound "on the wire", so it hasn't been
enabled yet.

> b) is it possible on linux to get low enough latency that doing the above 
> is bearable in conjunction with a dvd player doing its own video 
> processing? obviously there' slittle point exploring the ac3 side of 
> things, if there's no way to get latency down to a few milliseconds!

That depends on your hardware - I don't have trouble here with keeping a DVD
player running at full speed. 

We're not currently focused on latency issues, though. One of the other
devels can probably comment further on their plans for that.

J.
-- 
Jan Schmidt                                  thaytan at mad.scientist.com

The woman you buy -- and she is the least expensive -- takes a great
deal of money. The woman who gives herself takes all your time. - Balzac