James_Huk wrote:
@James McKenzie:
I see we are going a little off topic, but I must ask few things:
1. Do I understand correctly that you are planning OpenAL back-end in place of (or in addition to) current ALSA/OSS/JACK/NAS sound back-ends?
Not I, another developer has been working on Wine<->OpenAL. It would be
best to address this in the wine-devel list AFTER Wine 1.2 is released.
It appears that he has great plans.
2. Again - if I understand correctly, this back-end will work with ALSA,OSS4,DirectSound and CoreAudio (and probably with any other audio subsystem that have support for OpenAL)?
Hopefully. The problem is OpenAL<->hardware support in audio devices.
We were here about ten years ago with OpenGL<->video.
3. As for PulseAudio - I don't want to start flame here but... is it really that hard to implement (I mean - as I understand it, there already is a patch that adds support for it so...) Or you are not implementing it because you don't like PulseAudio, and don't want it to spread?
The problem is not how hard, but if it is really needed. Pulseaudio
sits on top of ALSA/OSS and really introduces delays. There are 'fixes'
for it. Again, I'm not the one that made this decision, the Wine
maintainer did after reading through the code for pulseaudio.
I say again - I don't want to start a war here, I am not a fan of current PA myself (however, I must say that I really like the idea of one API for all systems - from the programmer point of view), but since it is spreading (we like it or not) maybe you should reconsider support for it?
Again, there is one API, really, for video, openGL. The same should
exist for audio devices. Moving device operation from software to
hardware drops the load on the main CPU and actually improves quality
and fidelity. Without GPUs, we might still be looking at VGA.
Lastly, I don't make decisions. The Wine maintainer did in coordination
with the Wine Development team. If PA ever reaches the quality of
current/future ALSA/OSS implementations, then the project MIGHT take
another look at it. I don't think this is going to happen. PA will
have to pickup in/out MIDI stream and MIDI device support as well.
For now, Wine is concentrating on ALSA/OSS/OpenGL. That is from reading
through the wine-devel mailing list.
James McKenzie
