[Cbe-oss-dev] snd_ps3pf: PS3 ALSA Sound Driver, Support for AC3/DTS Passthrough

[Marc Bevand]

The latest publicly released version of the snd_ps3pf ALSA sound driver
for playstation 3 can be found in the kernel source tree linux-20061208
published there [1] (derived from 2.6.16, as I understand it). Geoff Levand
has not yet integrated the driver into his git tree on kernel.org [3].

According to the very limited public documentation about the sound
chip available on [2], it looks like it probably supports AC3/DTS
passthrough however [1] does not implement this feature. I have
looked at the source code and am not very familiar with the ALSA API
but it seems that adding support for this feature would just require
the implementation of a new snd_kcontrol_new named "IEC958
Playback Default" whose purpose would be to set some control bits
in the frames sent over the S/PDIF output. This can probably be done
in only 100-200 lines of code.

I have 2 questions:
o Does Sony plan to add support for AC3/DTS passthrough in the near
  future ? It doesn't look like a complex task.
o When will snd_ps3pf be ported to the git tree [3] ?

[1]
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/ps3-linux-distro-kit-20061208/src
[2] ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/ps3-linux-distro-kit-20061208/doc/LinuxKernelOverview.html
[3] git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/geoff/ps3-linux.git

-- 
Marc Bevand