[MPlayer-dev-eng] Ambisonic playback

[etienne deleflie]

Hello all,

I've just joined this list... I'm assuming the developer list is the 
right one, please tell me if not.

The Ambisonic community is putting together a specification for an 
Ambisonic player. We are aiming at a free, open source and 
cross-platfrom implementation. Hopefully we can integrate with an 
existing and established player like Mplayer.

Ambisonic playback is slightly more complicated than straight file 
playback because Ambisonic files typically have 4 channels, which need 
to be "decoded" to whatever speaker array the user has. So the typical 
use case is the user opens the file, configures Ambisonic playback for 
his/her specific speaker setup (like 6 speakers horizontally, or 8 
speakers in a cube, or 5.1 or whatever).

There is hence a significant GUI effort to undertake ... and there is 
ofcourse the Ambisonic decoding (I assume you have a good plugin 
architecture that can handle that). Lastly, there is also the fact that 
the user has to define which line (on their sound card) will take which 
signal.... and this usually needs to be tested with a "beep" so that the 
user can confirm they have the right speaker connections.

Could Mplayer integrate such a functionlity in its architecture and 
would the Mplayer community be interested in helping out, and hosting 
this effort?

(on Ambisonics : http://www.ambisonic.net/)

Etienne