[Flac-dev] Re: process for petitioning for more flac hardware support

[Andre]

> 
> i was wondering how one would go about approaching hardware
> manufacturers to support flac.
> 

One thing to do first might be to make sure that flac is suitable to
run on lost cost hardware. For example the amount of buffering required
in the decoder.

If I understand the flac format correctly, all decoders must support
block sizes upto 65535 samples (ie 256k of decoded stereo data).

For comparison, a SW MP3 decoder running on an embedded cpu can be run
in as little as 32k bytes of RAM (which includes 9k required to double
buffer _two_ frames (1152 samples each) of decoded audio).

Maybe it is always possible to play audio from a flac block without
buffering and decoding the whole block first (I don't know - I haven't
studied the source) but some information covering this type of issue on
the flac website might be a good starting point for persuading HW
manufacturers.

Just my 2 cents.... :-)

Andre
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