Re: The joy of pipes

On 19 Nov 2024 04:50:15 GMT, Robert Riches wrote:

A named pipe let mplayer write to a named file.

Another example is playing an audio file to a phone call made through the
Asterisk telephony engine. It wants the audio to be in a specific format
(e.g. GSM), while the original file might be in an entirely different
format. It’s easy enough to use FFmpeg to convert on the fly in real time.
The Asterisk playback command expects a file name, and I found that a
named pipe would work (bar a warning or two about it not being seekable).
Net result -- no need to pre-convert the audio or save temporary files
anywhere. And the pipe itself provides automatic synchronization between
the source (FFmpeg) and the sink (Asterisk).