Re: Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 17:31 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 22:56 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > What I'd like to know: what is still missing? what are the next steps?
> > Am I even near to get this into Gnome 2.10? Are there any general
> > objections towards replacing Esound with Polypaudio? I am interested
> > in a "yes" or "no" statement as definite and official as I can get it.
> 
> This is passing the buck a bit but I'd like to hear from some of the
> teams that would be using this - Helix, GStreamer, Rhythmbox, Sound
> Juicer, whoever.

I notice people have already been discussing this quite a bit while we
had some well deserved sleep here in Spain. Hopefully Iain will chime in
on this as he is the one who knows Polypaudio the best from the
GStreamer side. He is also hard at work implementing abstraction for
ding caching as discussed the last time in this thread. Hopefully that
will be ready within a few weeks, after which proposing patches to
libgnome using gstreamer instead of esound is the next step I guess.

Basically we don't have any arguments against polypaudio. Its clearly an
upgrade from esound so switching to it will clearly be beneficial in the
sense that we will have a better sound server. There clearly is the
issue brought up by many if GNOME actually needs an officially endorsed
sound server or not. I tried raising that question myself a couple of
times and gotten rolled over by Jim Getty every time. One thing as
people also have touched upon is that alsalib/dmix is a tad flaky still
so maybe using a sound server for the mixing also in the local case is
still the best solution for another iteration even for the local
scenario.

As for defaults. I think osssink is still set as the default in gst-
plugins. Personally I think the setting of this key should be tied to
the sound capplet. If you select 'start soundserver' I think they key
should switch to using the soundserver. If the checkbox is not selected
then I think osssink/alsasink/sunaudiosink/osxaudiosink etc. should be
used. A generic audiosink is planned, which will basically make a best
guess to what sink you want to use (although after some recent problems
with all autodetecting mediaplayers crashing for me I do think that this
might not be the holy grail people believe it to be, as opposed to each
os/distribution actually setting a default relevant to their own
system).

Christian