I just thought of something: Given the maximum supported network packet size, and the minimum number of channels (probably stereo) for a FLAC broadcast stream, it should be possible to calculate the absolute longest time that a single network packet could span. Once you know that time, you could simply double it, and then make sure the streaming client always buffers up at least that much time before playback is started. Voila - instant protection against starvation due to silent frames being compressed to ultra-tiny packets with a long delay.
Some of the comments here have talked about low latency, but I would say that low latency has no place in an internet streaming broadcast. I mean, the listened have no frame of reference for latency anyway, so what does it matter if the latency is really high? Now that I think about it this way, I'd say that FLAC and OggFLAC should not have any real problems due to compression of silent frames. Any place there is a problem should be blamed on bad streaming client / player code, not on the format itself. Brian Willoughby Sound Consulting _______________________________________________ Flac-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev
