[vdr] Re: VDR plugins - RFC - audio handling

[Andreas Schultz <aschultz@cs.uni-magdeburg.de>]

On Wednesday 22 May 2002 22:35, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
> Karlheinz Pischke wrote:
> > Hi Klaus,
> >
> > why do you insist on having "normal" and "special" audio handling ?
> >
> > Wouldn't it be a better approach (from design point of view) to use just
> > - cVideoDevice
> > - cAudioDevice
> > and do the exception handling (like Mono, Stereo, DD, AC3, DTS or
> > whatever)
> > afterwards ?
> > This would make the design and API cleaner and better structured,
> > wouldn't it ?
> >
> > You have already implemented (up to 1.0.x) the "normal" audio handling.
> > In
> > your new design you also have to only implement the "normal" audio
> > handling
> > as a kind of reference design for the audio handling class/plugin.
>
> The thing is that a "normal" recording simply consists of a video and

What is normal? I wouldn't buy a DVD player without DD/DTS, and times will 
come where this will be true for DVB receivers as well.

> an audio data stream. That's pretty much 99% of what VDR handles, so I'd
> like to keep that simple. As it is right now, the video and audio data is
> in one multiplexed stream and can be sent to the driver as such, no need
> to take it apart.

But the DVB card has not to be the primary audio out device. In fact the 
video/autio out device has not to be a DVB card at all. The current design is 
so centered arround that single piece of hardware that it is really hard to 
integrate other devices.
The point is, that there are a lot of possible situations where i would have 
to take appart even your "normal" streams, tweak them or even generaten them 
in the first place.
Suppose, i want to send the "normal" audio stream not to the DVB card, but to 
some other audio out device, (e.g. to a 6 channel sound card or a SPDIF 
card). Or suppose, i want to send the alternate language stream to 
headphones, while replaying the main language though the TV.

VDR started as a video recorder for DVB cards, but that doesn't mean that it 
has to stay that way. IMHO a versatile digital video recorder needs more that 
just recording and replaying of MPEG2 streams. Like it or not, VDR has become 
the core of a lot of additional modules which could benefit from a more 
unified audio stream handling.

I guess, my dream is to have vdr be a very flexible framework to combine all 
kinds of A/V and MPEG hardware into the ultimate multimedia "eierlegende 
Wollmilchsau". Do i want too much?

Andreas

-- 
Andreas Schultz <aschultz@cs.uni-magdeburg.de>
Student of computer science

"In accordance with plans for Linux OS world domination
      infiltration of governments is vital (:-))."