ac3dec - a free AC-3 stream decoder Written by Aaron Holtzman (aholtzma@engr.uvic.ca) Contributors: Michael Holzt <kju@flummi.de> - OSS output.c and misc errata Jim Miller <jmiller@heli.engr.sgi.com> - IRIX output.c Angelos Keromytis <angelos@dsl.cis.upenn.edu> - OpenBSD fixes Don Mahurin <dmahurin@dma.org> - stdin support for extract_ac3 Takefumi SAYO <stake@niagara.shiojiri.ne.jp> - FreeBSD tweak Charles M. Hannum <root@ihack.net> - fixes See the file COPYING for license details. The currently supported platforms are Linux, Solaris, IRIX, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. If you want support for other platforms, take a look at output_*.c for an idea of what you need to do. This software is completely useless to 99.99 percent of users out there. It is mostly of use to those interested in audio coding research and evaluating codecs. It could theoretically be used as a portion of a DVD playback system for unix systems. HOW TO COMPILE Building ac3dec should be easy. Here's how: ./configure && make all USAGE To find AC-3 streams on the internet, use www.google.com and search for "vob trailer". A vob is a "Video Object" which is just an MPEG-2 stream. The site www.hollywood.com has a few good MPEG-2s with AC-3 audio. The program tools/extract_ac3 will take an MPEG-2 stream and spit out AC-3 audio to stdout if it exists. You can easily pipe this data to the ac3 player like this: ./tools/extract_ac3 foo.vob | ./ac3dec/ You can also get AC-3 streams on a DVD. Check out http://www.linuxvideo.org for details. DEBUG OUTPUT You can get a whole pile of debug info by setting the environment variable AC3_DEBUG=1. Be sure to pipe stderr to a file or you probably won't get realtime playback. You can pipe stderr to a file like so: ./ac3dec foo.ac3 2> debug.out
