Re: About that Quality thing [was Re: TARBALLS DUE + Release Update / Schedule Slip]

[Leif Johnson <leif ambient 2y net>]

Hi all -

Sorry I've been offline so long. It took a long time to get my new
laptop and get it set up correctly. The longer I work with GNOME,
though, the prettier it gets. :)

On Sun, 2004-02-15 at 11:38, Ronald Bultje wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Luis Villa wrote:
> > gst-mixer regressing (might be unavoidable, given the gstreamer switch-
> > media dudes?):
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131575
> 
> That's not a regression. Old gnome-mixer (well, at least the one in
> gnome-media) didn't work with ALSA-0.9.x at all. It *is* a serious bug,
> though, we're aware of it and Leif has offered to work on it (some time
> ago). Leif, any comments?

I've been seeing a growing number of ALSA bug reports from users on
2.6.x kernel machines. I suppose this just means there are fewer OSS
users as more people use the new kernels, so we're finally exposing the
ALSA bugs. But just to minimize compatibility issues, we might need to
start requiring the 1.0 ALSA libraries, perhaps for GStreamer 0.8.

I've personally had quite a few problems using ALSA---usually hardware
based. For example, on my new powerbook, the sound card only supports
stereo output, so playing from mono sources doesn't work out of the box;
I'd need to set up something in my .asoundrc, from what I can tell.

The ALSA libraries make handling things like this fairly complex, but I
hope it's just a matter of intelligent programming in the GStreamer
elements. We might run into situations where a user would need some sort
of specific .asoundrc configurations (though I really hope not), but I
think we can get the ALSA elements (and thus the mixer, rhythmbox, etc.)
to where they work out of the box on most people's computers.

leif

--
Leif Morgan Johnson : http://ambient.2y.net/leif/