pulseaudio capability question

[Tom Horsley]

In the quest to find something useful pulseaudio can do for me,
I'm wondering if it can do more than just volume when it is mixing
several audio sources?

I would love to learn I can insert an output filter to use
ffmpeg to do on the fly conversion of all my audio to something
that can be sent to the SP/DIF optical output on my motherboard.

Then, while it is at it, accept already encoded audio streams
from a DVD I'm playing and bypass the ffmpeg layer for them.

Now that would be useful.