[Openal-devel] MP3 decoding library for OpenAL SI

[Sven Panne]

The OpenAL SI uses the SMPEG library for MP3 decoding, but this has a
few drawbacks:

 * It depends on SDL, raising the build/runtime requirements needlessly
(at least if the SDL backend is not used).

 * Starting with SuSE 10.0, SMPEG is not shipped with that distro
anymore. I don't know about other distros, but this is one of the major
distributions, which should work "out of the box".

There is the possibility to include the whole SMPEG source code from the
CVS repository on icculus.org as a fallback into the OpenAL SI, but this
doesn't look very attractive (code bloat, need to synch with the CVS
repo, build process becomes more fragile, etc.). Googling around a
little bit for an alternative, I came across libmad, mpeg4ip, mpg321,
mpg123, etc., but each has one or more of the following problems:

 * The library is not widely used, i.e. it doesn't come with the major
Linux/BSD/... distros.

 * There are some licensing problems, like GPL (the OpenAL SI is
LGPL'd). I'm not sure if this can be solved by dynamically loading the
respective library or not.

 * The library is unmaintained.

 * There is absolutely no documentation for developers.

 * The library only works for Windows.

 * The library only works for some *nix variant.

  etc. etc.

So my question is: Has anybody on this list a proposal how to proceed on
this issue? Even if one doesn't like the MP3 OpenAL extension, adding
MP3 support to freealut will face similar problems. Therefore I'd like
to hear some suggestions, currently I'm a bit clueless...

Cheers,
   S.