Re: Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Ronald Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

Op di 23-11-2004, om 07:18 schreef Gábor Farkas:
> Mike Hearn wrote:
> > http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-October/msg01520.html
[..]
> it involves dmix.
> dmix IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. ;)

dmix is good, it really is pretty good. Now, obviously, there's the
question of why we would care about theoretical niceties if nobody is
able to implement it correctly, and that's a very valid point. However,
I feel that quite some applications implement it correctly, and I've
noticed that the ALSA developers have grown and are willing to listen to
outsiders' criticism and are even willing to accept patches. I'm fairly
happy with that.

> maybe mplayer is buggy.

Gotta resist kicking in with the obvious here. :).

[..]

Anyway, all the above doesn't mean I necessarily agree with using
alsa/dmix, there's some fundamental problems there as well. First off,
there's Solaris, HP, BSD. Second, there's the issue with network
transparency, Jeff suggested to drop it, which I'm ok with. If we're
not, then we'd have to code that separately. That sucks. Thirdly, with
ALSA, we'll have the transition from ESD to ALSA, which will take a lot
of resources, unless we add a compatibility wrapper, which we'd have to
code as well. Efforts suck, especially when not needed. Polypaudio does
all this already.

Now consider that last sentence, it's very important. Polyp is basically
just an extra layer for talking with esound or alsa (just like alsa/dmix
or esound is another layer for talking with alsa/plughw), and it's an
instant no-efforts replacement for esound with an active maintainer.
That's pretty good. Obviously, it'll also have bugs, whereas esound was
pretty polished for the few features it provided...

I can't compare GStreamer's ding caching with polypaudio yet because I
didn't see any code yet. ;). But using polypaudio over alsa/dmix has
some advantages, unless someone's going to port alsa to Solaris now. :).

Ronald

-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>