Some sort of filter based filesystem

[Svein Halvor Halvorsen]

* Svein Halvor Halvorsen <svein-freebsd-questions at theloosingend.net> writes:
>  > What would be nice, is some kind of nullfs-like read only filesystem 
>  > that would send all files through a configurable filter when opened. 
>  > That way I could put all my music in FLAC format on hdd, and then, 
>  > when I wanted to transfer some tracks to my portable player, I could 
>  > grab the files from the ogg-directory. Or when I wanted to burn to 
>  > CD-A, I could grab 'em from the wav-dir.

* Lowell Gilbert [2005-07-19 12:18 -0400]
>  It's a clever idea, but not really very useful; usually a virtual
>  filesystem approach is good when you can generate the data as needed.
>  For something like this, you would need to pregenerate the various
>  forms anyway, so you wouldn't save disk space.


Why would the various forms need to be pre-generated?

I can easily imagine some mechanism where my flac files are filtered 
through a flac decoder and into a vorbis encoder on-the-fly. 
The same goes for iconv conversion, image processing, etc.

In fact, this is the sole purpose of my suggestion.