The VideoLAN Forums

And the encoded bit depth is even more useless, because it can be inferred from the codec. Not for every codec. In this case for A-Law everything can be guessed, but for some other formats this cannot be done so easily. For example FLAC technically supports 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit and single p...

This windows says directly PCM ALAW Stream , so it should show encoded bit depth, obviously. Decoded bit depth is completely independent from encoded stream, for now it always will be 16-bit for any other 16-bit or lower source anyway. It's pointless to display decoded bit depth, sample rate, etc. B...

In fact, most modern OSes use single precision, not 16-bit PCM, internally. Of course they are, because OS should not be a limiting factor. The point is not in max supported precision, but instead in lowest one. Today 16-bit PCM is usually the lowest supported, so decoding to 16-bit will cover the ...

Wrong. You can decode anything to anything if you need, but you will never recover data that was already lost before. Decoding to 16-bit PCM is not default and never was, it's the most common now, because 16-bit sound is most common now. On old mobile phones it was not decoded to 16-bit, because the...

And second, the fact of the matter is that the codec panel is supposed to show info about tracks, not files. And that's what it does. VLC 4.0 shows: the decoded sample size, if it exists: usually 32 bits as most decoders output single precision floating point. the original sample size, also if it e...

Thanks for help! Wow, so basically VLC lead developer is somehow unaware of meaning for the word "codec" while working on the most popular media player in the world. That's quite unexpected

G.711 A-Law is always using bit depth of 8 bits, but VLC somehow displays it as 16 bit audio in it's "Codec information" window on Windows.