[Kde-games-devel] To ogg or not to ogg?

[Ian Wadham]

On Wed, 1 Jul 2009 10:21:31 pm Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> I  think converting the gameover and victory sound should be OK.
> I'd prefer the fallingsound not to be converted, since the ogg ecoding
> would add some latency...
>
Surprise, surprise!  I tried changing all the sounds to OGG and
everything started playing better in KDE 4.2 and Qt 4.4.  The step
and climb sounds played properly for the first time ever and
concurrent sounds often played OK.

Then I found that even the .wav sounds performed about the same
with KDE 4.3 trunk and Qt 4.5.1 (qt-copy).  Then I tried OGG with
KDE 4.3 and Qt 4.5.1.  Even better performance and clarity, even
with concurrent sounds which are almost always heard now.  And
the .ogg files are significantly smaller than the .wav files, in all but
two case, as noted below.

Luciano's debugging messages showed that the MediaObject's
(sound channels) are being freed up much more promptly when
a sound's time has finished.  They are almost always free now,
whereas they were almost always busy in KDE 4.2 and before.

Those Phonon guys have done a great job of "tuning up" the
library.  Congratulations, guys !!!  I hope you are reading this.

As a finishing touch, I put the step and climb sounds back to
.wav.  The file sizes are < 4K bytes and the .wav form is slightly
smaller than the .ogg.  Running those sounds in .wav gave me
a more even rhythm in the stepping and climbing sound, I found.

I have committed these changes on KDE Games trunk and I would
appreciate it if as many people as possible would try out the
sounds.  You only need to run KGoldrunner with the sounds and
demo Settings turned on, then watch and listen ...

If there are no problems, I would like to backport the changes
into the KDE 4.3 branch.

If you are not running in a full KDE 4 desktop environment (e.g.
KDE 3.5 konsole and cs/cb scripts), you might have to start up
KNotify etc. to get the sounds to go.  I just click to stop the demo
and click the Use Menu button in the dialog box, which in turn
brings up a KMessageBox and activates the necessary KDE 4
background processes.

All the best, Ian W.