[Flac-dev] FLAC decoding details

[Jonathan Lee]

Hello all,
  I am writing an implementation of a FLAC decoder and I am polishing up 
some details. The format <http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html> page 
leaves some room for interpretation. Can anyone help me by clarifying 
the official rules about the following? Most of them are degenerate 
cases that probably don't happen in practice:

Thanks,
--Jonathan

Can the bits per sample change from frame to frame? If so, does this 
mean that the output sizes should be scaled to all be the bit width? Or 
sign extended?

Can constant or verbatim subframes have left/side, right/side, or 
mid/side channel assignment? If so, does the difference channel have an 
extra bit per sample?

Is it a fatal error if the minimum frame size is larger than the maximum 
frame size (in STREAMINFO)? What about the minimum number of samples 
being larger than the maximum number of samples?

If the residue bit width is given by an escape code, can this escape 
code be zero? What is the effect of reading "zero" bits? (assuming that 
the stream is not advanced and 0 is the value read)

The MD5 is calculated on the "unencoded data", but this leaves a lot of 
room for interpretation. Does this mean the data produced by the 
decoder, or the data that was passed to the encoded when the file was 
made? If it means on produced data, are the channels interleaved? Stored 
as big or little endian? If it means the original data, how can we be 
sure of the format of that data?

How do I handle negative QLPC shifts, officially? Treat them as positive 
left shifts? Or treat them as an error condition? Or treat them as a 
right shift with the shift index taken modulo 32 (as apparently happened 
with earlier versions of the reference code)?

If I read a signed value that is one bit, what is "1" equal to?

If a sample rate of zero is specified, is this a fatal error? Or should 
it be ignored?
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