Re: pulseaudio vs gnome

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2007-02-02 at 13:40 +0000, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
> On Sex, 2007-02-02 at 14:19 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > 
> > > Just an fyi, but In embedded systems running Gtk+, you don't want to
> > > have to spend the time to initialize/start up Gstreamer just to play
> > > "bling".  The time lag is far too great.  You limit Gstreamer use to
> > > items like movie and music playback - not system pings. 
> > 
> > But on systems that will want to do more impressive audio/visual stuff
> > sometimes anyway, such as the Nokia N770/N800, wouldn't you want
> > gstreamer to be loaded and initialized already anyway? Then there
> > shouldn't (theoretically) be any delay in playing a system beep.
> 
>   "Systems" do not want to do "impressive audio/visual stuff"; it's
> "applications" that want that.  It makes no sense for all applications
> to initialize GStreamer if only one or two of them need to do audio or
> multimedia stuff.

If _even one_ of them wants to do it then it may make sense to have it
pre-initialized, just as you'd expect esd to be initialized after
logging into GNOME now. Assuming that initialization is actually slow. 

I had not considered per-application memory costs, which is indeed worth
worrying about.

>   If you want to avoid delay when playing a beep, then all apps will
> have to initialize GStreamer and precache an audio sample.  Startup time
> and memory costs pile up.  It's much better to have a simple sound
> server (which can use GStreamer) and a simple client API; a full fledged
> GStreamer library is overkill for most apps IMHO.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com