[pulseaudio-discuss] Alternate sample rates

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

> Very Cool feature!  Why not change sample_spec totally according to
> sink's availability, but only sample rate? The default sample_spec
> used at initialization, if alsa driver supports various formats/rates,
>  PA could change sink's sample_spec in order to fit sink-input's
> request. Is there any risk or my misunderstanding ?

These patches do not always use the rate of the client. This only happens
when there's a exact match. In case of a difference between the client rate
and the sink rates, SRC will be used. These set of patches are mostly
intended to make SRC easier (integer ratios) or unnecessary. One of the main
goals was for example that voice calls would be resampled to 48kHz instead
of 44.1kHz, since a 3x or 6x resampling takes less resources.
But to your point we've discussed with Arun of dynamically updating the
number of channels supported for HDMI outputs. When the EDID/ELD is read, we
could use the information to automatically make the output multichannel, and
possibly set a higher sampling rate.
-Pierre