[gst-devel] mad decoder plugin : only 16bit audio, and no dither

[Ronald Bultje]

Hi,

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Samuel Krempp wrote:
> But then I investigated inside gstreamer a bit, to see for sure how the
> audio data was handled. I found that :
> 1. 16bit audio raw data seems to be the norm.

Not really. Almost all our decoder plugins output 32-bit float audio, not
16-bit integer. I think a52dec still does some internal conversion (which
should be removed, but nobody had time for that yet) and mad.

We accept patches for those, you're very welcome to send one.

> Looking at the mail archives, gstreamer provides a float audio type
> (maybe it's not as straight forward for app developpers to use as int
> type..)

It's fully automatic, app developers need not even know what float audio
is.

> But then gstreamer's mad decoder plugin also forces 16 bit output.
> Why is that ?

Legacy; we never changed it. In 0.6.x, 16bit audio was mainstream. We only
moved over to internal audio formats (float, 32bit, ...) in the 0.7.x
process, and apparently we forgot one plugin. :).

> 2. no dither
[..]

If you wish, add that to the audioconvert plugin. Shouldn't be hard.

Ronald