[pulseaudio-discuss] ask about passthrough support

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

> > 1. Is it only useful when there's hardware decoding functionality
> > available? Can I simply test out passthrough with the current ALSA sound
> > card (some emulations possible)?
> 
> Pretty much. The whole idea is that you're pushing out compressed audio,
> so something needs to decode it -- an a/v receiver that does AC3/DTS, or
> a Bluetooth headset that supports MP3 decode.

To build on Arun's comment, the infrastructure is in place at the
PulseAudio level for HDMI/SPDIF and BT. Once the compressed API is
available in the kernel, we'll enable DSP-based decoding as well.
Ironically this was the initial goal but we took the long road to avoid
having to write platform-specific PulseAudio sinks/sources.
-Pierre