ac3dec - a free AC-3 stream decoder

Written by Aaron Holtzman (aholtzma@engr.uvic.ca)

Contributors:
  Michael Holzt <kju@flummi.de>

See the file COPYING for license details.

The currently supported platforms are Linux and Solaris. If you want
support for other plaforms, 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. 
There are issues with DVD encryption and licensing that need to be
resolved however.

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 | ./decode

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:

  ./decode foo.ac3 2> debug.out
