Michele Carla` wrote:
On Thu, 2006-04-06 at 08:00 -0400, Timothy Miller wrote:
On 4/6/06, Daniel Rozsnyó <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But it's sure would be nice to use a card who
have realtime dolby digital encoding, an optical connector output and
work on any platform.
How complicated is to make an AC3 encoder in HW (fpga) and what will be
the latency? I think that is one of the things what are missing from
today's soundards.
I don't know the answer to that question, but one of the things I had
in mind was the ability for the card to hardware decode a number of
different formats, including the compressed ones. We may not be able
to do MP3 _encoding_ due to patents, but most Linux users would be
storing on Ogg format anyway. Those who wanted MP3 could store
uncompressed and convert later in software. But I think we can do MP3
_decoding_ with no problem (although it may not be worth the effort).
Nico's post suggests that Dolby must own a patent on it. I am
ambivalent about that, although I suspect that AC3 is not one of those
abusive software patents. Given that we're selling hardware, we CAN
afford to pay reasonable royalties. The algorithms can be developed
in the open, and then the companies get their royalties from the sale
of the hardware.
Are we talking about a professional audio card, or about a gamer-card:
in the first case AC3, MP3, OGG, or everything else that is lossy is
totaly unusefull... maybe Flac could have sense !
in the second case an OpenAL implementation could be more appropriate !
I presume that by "hardware" we mean a dedicated DSP (with a hardware
multiplier), in which case the software could be in RAM and could be up
(or down?) loaded to the board.
--
JRT
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