Native multichannel is not going to happen. Two channelness is so massively ingrained into both the server and squeezeplay that it would take a complete start from scratch rewrite to do native multichannel.
The only way to do it with the existing system is to embed the multichannel into two channels and have a decoder outside the box split it up. You can already do this with DTS or DolbyDigital, but of course those are lossy formats. There is no reason why you can't do a lossless multichannel into two channel format, but you would need an external decoder. It certainly could be done and would have a much higher probability of happening than Logitech redesigning the Touch to do it directly. One possibility would be to take your multichannel input, flac encode it, then parcel it out into 2 channel 24/96. You might be able to get 4 channels of 24/96 into two with flac encoding but there is no way to get 5.1 24/96. You could do it if you went with 24/192 as the "carrier" format, but the Touch's output can't do that unless you use USB. You COULD implement a simple USB driver that took the data from the Touch decoder and shoved it out over USB, bypassing ALSA etc. The outside world device would get the data and convert it to whatever you want. The way the Touch has been architected this would not be too hard, it would take a replacement for the jive_alsa process which can easily be added to the Touch. You would have to modify the player capabilities file on the server so it will allow 24/192 files to be sent as is. Of course there are no standards for any of this so one would have to be devised and then software and hardware written to support it. It COULD work but would take a lot of effort and would probably need some very enthusiastic group of people to push it through and probably provide the funds to implement things. Any of you that want this so much willing to take it on? John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=88056 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
