flac dev - Nov 2008 - FLAC support for unsupported win32 programs

Not sure if this tool already exists in some form, or if it's been talked
about before.. but I got to thinking of a way to support FLAC in
applications that haven't added support in their code:

In windows, programs can be launched using the Microsoft Detours API (or
similar). This API can be used to do binary instrumentation on the programs.

This instrumentation can be used to intercept file i/o calls. This means
that we can simulate the existance of a .wav file (for example), even when
that file does not really exist.

This capability can be harnessed by creating a wrapper program that opens a
.flac file, and pretends that it is actually a file with a .wav extension.
To the application, it sees a wav file. Behind the scenes, the wrapper
utility would convert all file read/writes to FLAC files.

With some creative instrumentation, this technique could give users the
capability to open FLAC files with their default .wav file handler. Also,
the technique could even support drag+drop operations (with an explorer
plugin and/or explorer instrumentation).

Anyway, I think this is very feasable, but thought I would run it through
you FLAC developers before digging into it deeper. It would be really nice
to have FLAC support in a great number of random DJ tools I've been using
that do not support it already (not to mention various other multimedia
applications).

This could also really help make FLAC a more popular format, which is good
for us all :)!

What'dya think?

caustik
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On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 17:34 -0800, Aaron "Caustik" Robinson
wrote:
> Not sure if this tool already exists in some form, or if it's been
> talked about before.. but I got to thinking of a way to support FLAC
> in applications that haven't added support in their code:
> 
> In windows, programs can be launched using the Microsoft Detours API
> (or similar). This API can be used to do binary instrumentation on the
> programs.
> 
> This instrumentation can be used to intercept file i/o calls. This
> means that we can simulate the existance of a .wav file (for example),
> even when that file does not really exist.
> 
> This capability can be harnessed by creating a wrapper program that
> opens a .flac file, and pretends that it is actually a file with
> a .wav extension. To the application, it sees a wav file. Behind the
> scenes, the wrapper utility would convert all file read/writes to FLAC
> files.
> 
> With some creative instrumentation, this technique could give users
> the capability to open FLAC files with their default .wav file
> handler. Also, the technique could even support drag+drop operations
> (with an explorer plugin and/or explorer instrumentation).
> 
> Anyway, I think this is very feasable, but thought I would run it
> through you FLAC developers before digging into it deeper. It would be
> really nice to have FLAC support in a great number of random DJ tools
> I've been using that do not support it already (not to mention various
> other multimedia applications).
> 
> This could also really help make FLAC a more popular format, which is
> good for us all :)!
> 
> What'dya think?
I've not seen or heard of anything for FLAC, but I believe this is how
Avisynth and Virtual Dub's aviproxy work for AVI files on windows.
http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page
http://virtualdub.org/docs_frameserver.html

In those cases, it seems to be a very useful idea which is a bit less
than 100% reliable, but invaluable for those programs / situations where
it works. It might be easier for WAV than AVI because we don't have as
many windows APIs to worry about.

Richard