[flac-dev] 64-bit residuals

[Martijn van Beurden]

Op wo 30 mrt. 2022 om 16:02 schreef Martijn van Beurden <mvanb1 at gmail.com>:
> One added advantage of setting both limits for 32-bit encodings (not
> allowing stereo decorrelation and limiting residuals to 32-bit) is
> that libFLAC from 1.2.1 onwards and ffmpeg since May 2015 are
> "forward-compatible". ffmpeg actually needs limiting the residual to
> 31-bits for that to work. A working patch for the ffmpeg FLAC encoder
> can be found here:
> https://patchwork.ffmpeg.org/project/ffmpeg/patch/20220108142437.756529-1-mvanb1@gmail.com/
> In fact, the files generated with this patch play on a few hardware
> devices I tested them with that use a libFLAC-derived decoder.

I just realised I forgot to mention one additional constraint this
patch imposes for backwards-compatibility: those files also cannot
include fixed predictors. So there are four constraints for
backward-compatible 32-bit streams: no fixed subframes, no stereo
decorrelation, no predictions exceeding a 32-bit int and no residuals
exceeding a "31-bit int". Summing this all up, this seems to be
getting out of hand just for the sake of being compatible with
software that was never meant to decode these streams in the first
place

I'll start working on a patch to include stereo decorrelation and
handling fixed subframes for 32-bit FLAC in both decoder and encoder
to do some more testing. It seems that those two changes are worth the
extra encoding and decoding complexity, while adding handling for >
32-bit residuals (which need new bitreader and bitwriter functions)
does not.

Kind regards,

Martijn van Beurden