Re: Proposal: replacing esound with polypaudio in 2.10

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 10:06 +0100, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> Le mer 03/11/2004 à 00:44, Maciej Katafiasz a écrit :
> > Dnia 02-11-2004, wto o godzinie 22:04 +0100, Xavier Bestel napisał:
> > > > I see the point Alan is trying to make, but is this relevant for Gnome
> > > > adoption?  I mean, on what machines is Gnome (especially 2.10)
> > > > actually usable which are not equipped with a FPU?  
> > > 
> > > GStreamer code can't run without FPU.
> > 
> > Not entirely true. While this is technically correct as in "you can't
> > compile gst without floats", in practice that code isn't executed unless
> > you actually process float data. Everything depends on what plugins you
> > use. I know of at least one person using GStreamer regularly on VIA
> > Epia, which isn't widely known for its exceptional FPU performance...
> 
> Yes, you're right, it depends on the plugin used. GST uses FP maths for
> all time-based operations (framerates in video plugins, samplerates in
> audio plugins). As the bulk of the encoding/decoding is often
> integer-based, this doesn't matter much, but for some plugins like
> resample there are lots of FP maths involved. And as the pipelines are
> often autoplugged (i.e. the plugins are choosed automatically depending
> on the input src and output sink capabilities) it's hard to tell which
> plugins are gonna be used.

Actually this is not true, it is easy to tell who will be used.
GStreamer plugins are chosen based on their rank which is a number
assigned to them. Which means that the plugin with the highest rank will
always 'win', so if you have two ogg decoding plugins, the one with the
highest rank will always be used in an autoplugging scenario. So if you
want to use the other one you either change their ranks or you can of
course remove the higher ranking one.

Christian