Is there any way to get rid of Box<T> in the source?

[dmtrKovalenko]

My use case is pretty simple — I need to decode a buffer while leaning toward a very transparent lifecycle of the top-level buffer.

But with Symphonia I simply can't because you require the input to be Exactly the Box for some reason. Why? I am wondering if there is any way to receive a simple slice + Sync + Send and read all data directly?

[pdeljanov]

MediaSourceStream requires a boxed dyn MediaSource so that it can work for many possible media sources (e.g., File, Cursor, HTTP client, etc.) without having to be generic itself. The problem with making MediaSourceStream generic is that all FormatReaders would also have to be generic as well. For cases where you may have different media sources (e.g., a media player), this would lead to some extreme binary bloating.

It sounds like your issue is related to lifetimes though? Would #236 help?

[dmtrKovalenko]

#236 will definitely help. It was something I considered to do myself until found that I can't read data back neither.