SACD/DSDIFF playback in XBMC

Hi Salora - very few devices of any type handle DSD well. I understand completely what you mean by the "warm" or very natural sound of DSD vs PCM, but it's quite minimal when the conversion is done at high rates like 176.4khz.

Lucky for me I have two players which both handle SACD iso's burned to DVD-R, a Denon 5900 Universal Player (my god, what a machine!) and a much cheaper and more available Sony BDP-S580 Bluray player.

With serious listening the Denon trumps, but the downgrade using Foobar and a 24/176.4 pcm conversion is a fairly small trade-off for the ability to have these all archived and instantly accessible, and of course no chance of scratching the precious discs or exposing them to harm.

The holdup is that some of the Foobar plugin code is licensed by Philips Ltd, and the authors have replied, but bumped it over to their Intellectual Properties people, who have to date not responded. XBMC cannot include that code, as we publish under the GPL all software as open-source and free to copy, use, distribute, etc.

Still sorta hold out hope, even if at some point there's a binary addon hook introduced for audio codecs - then an unofficial patch may happen - never know

hi dddamian, first of all congrats for the long expected AE !! ;-)
any chance of supporting asio drivers with it?

and I saw you had the authorisation to use Maxim Anisiutkin's foo_sacd.dll decoder, so will it be added too AE or I did not understand the whole thing?

Part of that code is is not GPL-compatible, so licensing issues exist. This includes with Foobar. Technically we cannot use/modify/distribute those components, which are essential for decoding DST (compressed DSD).

Did you ask Philips "if we don't hear from you within 1 month, we assume that we may use the code"?

heh - if I take your new Lexus and you can't find it in a month it's mine?

And that is why the content industry is having such a hard time with file sharing.. intellectual property is not the same as physical property... there's no theft

(2012-05-31 21:27)DDDamian Wrote:  Part of that code is is not GPL-compatible, so licensing issues exist. This includes with Foobar. Technically we cannot use/modify/distribute those components, which are essential for decoding DST (compressed DSD).

I was afraid you'd say that

so I guess Maxim A is using the code without the license.

I can use foobar as well but it would be nice to have it into xbmc

believe me, i would love to. I have a ton of SACDs too, and if I could do this without jeopardizing XBMC I would in a flash....

well if we put the sacd's appart,
any chance to use the asio driver of the asus xonar Hdav13 with xbmc AE ?
because that sound card is doing miracles on flac files with foobar and asio, I even find flacs better that sacd iso (for exemple the shm-sacd of queen don't seem better than flac )

@salora - what OS are you running? There is no current ASIO sink for XBMC, and if you're running Win WASAPI will give you the same quality.

Comparing SACD and FLAC is apples and oranges, as is comparing two different masterings of a recording.