Tim Newsham<[email protected]> wrote: // Yah, this format doesnt come up that often.. perhaps its not // worth the effort, but then again the ability to switch a device's // encoding isnt very much work either... About as hard as // changing the sampling rate or turning stereo on and off...
i'd argue that the primary cost is not the effort (of writing a decoder vs. driving the encoder to accept a different format), but the impact on the design. being able to say "this takes pcm" is a win. my main question comes from "fancy" formats. on cards that do 5.1, for example, do we simply write 6-channel pcm samples in a defined order? i have no idea how the cards behave in this regard. if it requires more than that (say, write ac-3 directly), i'd suggest that's not /dev/audio.
