[FFmpeg-devel] Audio conversion and floating-point codecs

[Peter Ross]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2010 at 03:13:26PM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> Peter Ross <pross at xvid.org> writes:
> 
> > On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 08:17:51PM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> >> There is a long-standing desire from some to make the floating-point
> >> decoders output float samples instead of converting to int16
> >> internally, and I agree with the reasons for this.  However, making
> >> this change hastily will make decoding orders of magnitude slower on
> >> many CPUs.  The reason is that when a decoder outputs float samples,
> >> the fast asm code for float-to-int conversion is not used.
> >> 
> >> In order to change the output format of these decoders without
> >> impacting performance, we must first make a few improvements to the
> >> avcodec API and to the generic audio format conversion code.
> > [...]
> >
> >> - The decoders should output planar audio instead of interleaved for
> >>   multichannel streams.  This probably means introducing
> >>   avcodec_decode_audio4() with an AVFrame output.
> >
> > Q: does it make sense to expand the existing AVFrame structure, or
> > define a new struct specific to audio?
> >
> > #define FF_MAX_CHANNELS  8
> > struct AVAudioFrame {
> >     uint16_t *data[FF_MAX_CHANNELS];
> > };
> 
> I've posed the same question myself, without finding a good answer.
> Some codecs support a huge number of channels.  I can say for sure,

Second contenious point:
At present, the user allocates the samples buffer that is handed
of to avcodec_decode_audioN().

IMHO this is sloppy. Just look at how ffmpeg.c guesses the buffer size.
The alternative is to have the decoder do it, e.g. by calling
avctx->get_buffer() with the number the samples/channels to be output.
Thoughts?

> however, that uint16_t is the wrong data type to use here.

Oops. I intended int16_t.

-- Peter
(A907 E02F A6E5 0CD2 34CD 20D2 6760 79C5 AC40 DD6B)
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