> > 1. Is it only useful when there's hardware decoding functionality > > available? Can I simply test out passthrough with the current ALSA sound > > card (some emulations possible)? > > Pretty much. The whole idea is that you're pushing out compressed audio, > so something needs to decode it -- an a/v receiver that does AC3/DTS, or > a Bluetooth headset that supports MP3 decode. To build on Arun's comment, the infrastructure is in place at the PulseAudio level for HDMI/SPDIF and BT. Once the compressed API is available in the kernel, we'll enable DSP-based decoding as well. Ironically this was the initial goal but we took the long road to avoid having to write platform-specific PulseAudio sinks/sources. -Pierre
