MAS (Media Application Server)

[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 10:07:10PM +0200, Tim Jansen wrote:
> Today I  attended a presentation about MAS 
> (http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net)  and spoke to the guys at the Linux 
> Kongress, Cologne. MAS is basically a sound server, it could be used for 
> other realtime media though, and seems to be a very nice system. But the most 
> interesting news, at least for me, was that MAS is will be in X11R6.7. So in 
> a year or two it could be included in every XFree....
> 
> You can find the slides here:
> http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net/lk2002.pdf

I am not sure if MAS or "the next ASD incarnation" will be the perfect solution
for a sound server. Thus I would suggest, that if MAS is an intersting target,
we switch every sound access in KDE that we can to CSL. Then, we can add
backends for MAS, ESD, ASD (aRts backend is already there) so that the user
can then decide which sound server to use.

Currently, I am working on an CSL output for aRts, so as soon as a CSL backend
for MAS exists, you could at least cascade artsd to MAS. Of course the same
could be done for knotify.

I think the same would be a sane thing to do for Gnome and GStreamer and maybe
SDL. If everybody relied on the same set of "drivers" for sound, the actual
sound server becomes less of an issue than it is now, because you can easily
switch servers.

I've started to talk to the MAS developers and they seem to be interested in
supporting CSL. The current version of CSL can be found in the freedesktop.org
CVS, a release is at http://www.arts-project.org/doc/csl-0.2.0.html.

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
  -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan at space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
     KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-