xbmc/xbmc — pull request #1138 by theuni (2012-07-09 07:51:54+00:00)
Title: Dirty audio

This work comes from @jmarshallnz, I'm just the PR monkey.

1. Don't have AE constantly converting and otherwise wasting resources when there is no sound output. Saves a boatload of cpu usage on embedded platforms.
2. Pass the status from 1 down to the sinks, so that they can choose to be smarter when there's nothing to do.

Note that for 2, we don't actually change any sink behaviors, only give them the knowledge of whether the buffer contains silence or real audio. Some sinks may be able to do nothing, while others may have to keep silence flowing. I'll leave that to the various platform devs.