Re: Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Gábor Farkas <gabor z10n net>]

Mike Hearn wrote:
> Gábor Farkas wrote:
>
> > there is one problem with your proposal.
> >
> > it involves dmix.
> >
> > dmix IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. ;)
>
>
> Did you ever try mplayer with esound, arts, or polypaudio? Do you have 
> similar sync/latency problems with these mixing layers or are you 
> comparing the dmix case to the direct-to-hardware care?

1. the most important thing i wanted to say is that dmix does NOT solve 
the problem of playing multiple audio-sources at the same time. at least 
not in his current state

2. i remember teh polypaudio-author telling here that it support 
lip-sync playback.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-October/msg00438.html
"- A sensible synchronisation API: with polypaudio you can have Lip
  synchronous movie playback over the network. (A patch for a
  polypaudio driver for mplayer has been posted on the respective
  mailing list)"
i assumed that then it works fine on a local computer too ;)
> Actually it doesn't necessarily involve dmix, that's just the easiest 
> one to set up. You could have any mixing layer in there. Even a sound 
> server type plugin (doesn't ALSA already ship with one that was dropped 
> when dmix started development?)
>
> I also never got dmix to work quite right either. However, every time I 
> have tried it, it has got better. In FC3 it does basically work, audio 
> is of a high quality, the only problem is that XMMS sometimes stops. I'm 
> not sure if that's dmixs fault or not. The XMMS ALSA plugin seems to be 
> quite buggy as well :)
3. yes. my problem with dmix is that it's been there for a long time, 
and it still does not work well. as you also wrote, it basically-works 
for xmms. that's VERY far from works-perfectly-in-(mplayer/totem/xine/vlc)
> I'd agree with Colin that bugs should not determine the architecture of 
> something this important though.
well...yes, i agree. technically for me it does not really matter, 
because if there will always be a gconf key saying the gstreamer-sink, i 
can simply set that to anything i need...
> Finally dmix is being actively developed by the ALSA maintainers at 
> least, who are employed by SuSE.
let's hope they fix this.

i think i'll try out polypaudio before adding any other arguments here 
;)  (but there's no gentoo ebuild for it :( will have to build it from 
source ;( )

gabor