[linux-audio-dev] LADSPA AC3 encoder?

[Lee Revell]

Question for the DSP gurus:

How hard would it be to implement an AC3 encoder as a LADSPA plugin that
could be used in an ALSA config to encode stereo and 5.1 sources on the
fly?  Many Windows drivers seem to contain one, and it would be a nice
response to the naysayers on LKML who doubt the power of ALSA.

It appears that a simple AC3 encoder is ~1500 lines of code:

http://www.koders.com/c/fid04210C5E2BC83FC0BA5E0A2A1C37D52503E31EFD.aspx

http://www.telos.de/Surround_Sound_Formats.360.0.html#1051

FWIW, when emu10k1/2 based cards first came out Creative claimed the DSP
was powerful enough to do AC3 encoding on the fly, but, they never
shipped an implementation - their drivers did it in software.  One of
their engineers said the DSP wasn't suited for the frequency domain
processing required to encode AC3.

Lee