On Mar 21, 2014, at 08:07 26, Chris Smowton <[email protected]> wrote:

> The next feature Cam FM really wanted was M4A import support. The attached 
> patch provides it using libmp4v2 for metadata extraction and faad 
> (dynamically located searching rdxport.cgi's path at runtime) for audio 
> extraction. It calls the libsndfile import path on a temporary wav produced 
> using faad. 

RD v1.x used this approach extensively for doing audio conversions.  We moved 
away from it to our current in-process based approach because of a number of 
problems; the most intractable being process control: it was very difficult 
reliably to detect and properly recover from errors occurring in one of the 
external converters.


> I appreciate this differs from the other stage 1 audio conversion filters, 
> which perform audio extraction in-process; however it seemed as if I would 
> need to more or less copy-and-paste 1,000 lines worth of faad into Rivendell 
> to go that way, and miss out on future faad patches to boot. Therefore I 
> stuck with invoking an external process. Because faad cannot be instructed to 
> seek and decode only a subset of the file this will be very inefficient at 
> importing a small snippet from a huge source file; however I expect this is a 
> rare use case if it exists at all? 

M4A support for Rivendell is a terrific idea, but I think we need to do it 
‘in-process’ in the same way as all of the other converters.  Faad(1) itself is 
in fact just a command-line wrapper around libfaad (in the same way as lame(1) 
is a wrapper around libmp3lame), so this should be possible without having 
‘swallow’ a lot of code from Faad.

Cheers!


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