seanadams Wrote: > It's an extension of the s/pdif spec. Basically it allows any kind on > non-PCM data (including mp3, for example) to be sent over s/pdif by > sending the compressed bitstream as bursts with some headers and zeroes > in between to delimit them. In order to do this encoding, SB2 would need > to do some parsing of the stream in order to determine the average > bit-rate to be transmitted. I can't say this would be a high-priority > project or that we'd be able to implement this in the near term. > However it could be done on the server with a transcoding plugin if > somebody wanted to write it.
Thanks for your reply Sean -- I appreciate you taking the time to explain this. And I do understand that firmware changes such as this are not necessarily going to be useful to the majority of users, so other items may take priority. I'm willing to help if I can, but before I try delving into the server code (I've not really used Perl in earnest so I'd be learning a language and a problem domain at the same time) I'd like to try some experiments. If I could transform my DTS file into a binary data file suitable for sending over an S/PDIF link, can I then configure the server (through the 'types' or 'convert' config files?) to pass that test file through? Does that also need some plugin assistance? I presume from what you've said that if this was done in a plugin, there would be no firmware changes needed. I don't have an S/PDIF connection from my PC to a receiver, but I bet I could convince some software player to generate an S/PDIF stream and write it to a file. After that (or instead of that), I reckon I could dig around for a spec to perform the process myself. I see that projects such as 'ac3iec958' (http://www.theiling.de/downloads/idx.cgi/ac3iec958*?lang=en) exist to do something similar for AC3. I would naively have thought that the process for DTS would be the same, again remembering that a DVD player doesn't need to know how to parse a DTS stream... but perhaps DTS/DD streams have a similar format (so a DTS stream's bitrate can still be parsed by AC3-aware hardware), or perhaps a DVD player can just make assumptions about the stream (this is more likely true, as a DVD-Video DTS stream can only have a particular bitrate and frequency, I think). So my first naive converter could start with similar assumptions to a DVD player (sort of) and convert the bitstream without looking into it. A more advanced converter would pull the bitrate from the header instead (not too tricky -- it's just a few bits near the start which index into a table). I'll look into this some more later. If you could point me in the right direction, server config-wise, to streaming the padded file, I'd appreciate it. Thanks again, Steve -- smst _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
