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

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 05:22:46PM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
 
> 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.

Indeed. Even ALSA's own official plugings (dmix and co) fail
to provide the 'full' ALSA interface. Try to run Jack on top
of one of those. It should all be just transparent, the docs
and marketing blurb suggest it is, but in reality it isn't.

Simple fact is that once you have an 'mmap' style API in
userspace all the others can be created easily on top of
that by a client-side library. So ALSA shouldn't try and
provide all those variations, it should just have provided
such a library. Same for resampling, format conversions etc.
The only thing that ALSA should have provided natively is
multi-client access.

Ciao,

-- 
FA

Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal, die Sonne scheint - ein Glitzerstrahl.

1324423783.12937_0.ltw:2,a <20111220232935.GC16936 at linuxaudio dot org>