[MPlayer-dev-eng] Questions About Audio Decoding

[Mike Melanson]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Alex Beregszaszi wrote:

> are you willing to add only apple variant of rle? (i mean 4bit msrle variant
> can be added too)
> have you got some samples? can you upload it?

	What other flavors are there besides Apple and MS? The MS flavor
is already covered by the adapted XAnim code. Doesn't it handle the 4-bit
variant? Oh...I just looked at the code and saw that it's not covered.
Okay, I'll try to add that, too. Should I rewrite the MS-RLE8 decoder as
well, in order to help reduce the volume of that weird XAnim code in the
codebase?

	As for the samples, I already have some QT files that use (I
believe) 24-bit RLE. However, I know someone who works with Apple
multimedia and I'm going to politely ask her to make up some samples of
all 7 variants for testing. I'll be sure to share with the rest of the
group, too.

> did you saw the sourcecode? i think it's hard to implement it into mplayer
> (the win32 version is fully completed in the sources, the linux one is
> non-completed), but i wish you good luck to it.

	Yeah, I have all the source code. Anyone who registers (freely) at
vp3.com is welcome to download the latest CVS snapshot, and also access
the repository and developer's BBS. I just need to sift through it all and
find the modules to which I can feed compressed frames and get back
decompressed frames. And I believe the VP3 license is loose enough that we
can just include the relevant source files into the MPlayer codebase.

	Unless, by "did you saw the sourcecode?", you meant "have you
glanced at the sheer enormity of the task ahead?" Well, all I can say is
that I figured out enough of the MPlayer codebase to add a video decoder
AND a file demuxer...there is *no way* the VP3 source could be more
convoluted...:) (and it isn't; I've seen it)

	-Mike Melanson