Re: [Jack-Devel] How to get mplayer and firefox/flash to play

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 5:03 PM, Robin Gareus <[hidden]> wrote:
> On 12/20/2011 09:12 PM, Fons Adriaensen wrote:

>> Which still leaves the question why things don't just work
>> with the alsa->jack plugin.
>
> Hi Fons,
> Do you really think that this is interesting and important?
> Why don't you have a look?
>
> I assume that it's due to the multitude of possible ways that clients
> can interact with ALSA: some push, some pull, some request specific
> buffer-sizes and/or bit-depth,... others use weird workarounds for
> internal [timing] issues: In particular closed source apps like flash,
> skype..

i was working earlier this year on another ALSA PCM plugin that took
PCM data and pushed into shared memory. it had as "clients" a variety
of windows applications using a variety of windows audio APIs. even
without the additional complication of supporting multiple processes
(no, you can't use dmix as part of a PCM plugin :((( ), it was
nightmarish enough that eventually things just got sort of abandoned.
but read on below ...

> Frankly, I think that the alsa-jack plugin was a design mistake to begin
> with (sorry Maarten). It was a certainly a cool hack in 2003, but
> it has not been fixed in 8 years and I doubt it ever will.

it doesn't need to be fixed. ALSA and OSS are the problems. by
allowing applications to be coded with such a variety of cobbled
together solutions, it becomes a huge task to write any kind of plugin
that can tolerate all their behaviours. this is, of course one of the
central problems facing pulseaudio. PA *has* gotten fairly close to
providing a plugin (i.e. a software device driver) that works for
*almost* all clients *almost* all of the time. but yes, not all
clients and not all the time.

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