Disabling aRts in knotify

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Wednesday 18 February 2004 22:01, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 February 2004 20:25, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > I mean almost everything in KDE is plugin-based, I think it must be
> > possible to make the kde sound backend plugin-based too. One plugin for
> > arts, one for OSS, one for ALSA, one for gstreamer, one for MAS, ....
> > Basically these plugins would simply forward sampled raw audio data to
> > the backend. Almost no cpu usage, much few chances to crash, etc.
>
> "plugin", means "plug this functionality into this app",

More like "plug this functionality in the lower-level sound backend lib which 
is used by the higher level media framework lib". 
Whereas the lower level lib only offers basic features: play samples, play 
encoded data if the current plugin is able to do this.

> so where will the
> ALSA plugin plug? I can say in a standard audio-packed dispatcher (btw,
> media is only audio for you?) 

In 99% of the cases yes. And yes, I watch videos and dvd on my box.
But seriously, playing videos is much different from playing audio, there are 
no "desktop notification videos" or something like that.

Sound can be used for: 
-notifications
-playing music
-special purposes (game effects, speech synth,...)

Video is used for: 
-watching a video

IMO keeping video and audio in sync is still no easy task, and even the most 
advanced video players (mplayer, xine) are not perfect with it. Now put a 
sound daemon in the mix and I'm not sure that this will improve the situation 
in any way. Video is still something special, nevertheless it should have a 
simple to use api, but I think the actual video decoder needs to have as 
direct access to the sound hardware as possible.

> that takes packets from various apps and
> mixes them (do you want only one playing app at a time?) before sending
> them to the raw device finally.
> What if I play an AC3 file? my soundcard can send it directly to my Hi-Fi,
> so the "pluggable audio dispatcher" should be able to recognize them and
> avoid decoding... or should the app do this?
> At the same time we don't want to rewrite Ogg and MP3 decoders in every app
> that need to play them so we write other plugins to plug in the same
> "dispatcher" (and solve also the AC3 problem).
>
> Maybe it's me, but this "dispatcher" reminds me of aRts...

In most cases there is no need for dispatching, there is a need for decoding. 
Use a lib for that.

Bye
Alex
-- 
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