Re: pulseaudio vs gnome

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

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 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.

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>
The universe is always one step beyond logic.