Playing .ogg files

[Andreas Beckermann]

On Monday 03 March 2003 00:45, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
>    Hi!

Hi

> On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 07:22:45PM +0100, Andreas Beckermann wrote:
> > Nice discussions around here currently - sometimes even useful ones ;)
> > So here one thing from Stefan in "Re: Questions about arts (mostly to be
> > used in docs)". He/You said that Arts::Synth_PLAY_WAV is cachable,
> > whereas Playobjects are not.
> > Well, most of the sound code from my game is more or less copied from
> > different KDE apps (lacking any documentation in arts), so I am of course
> > using playobjects. But - as said - I am writing a game, so I need them to
> > be cachable at any cost (we are one step away from disabling sound for
> > release, because it makes the game unplayable).
> >
> > So what should I use to play .ogg files? Any code snippets around?
>
> The sad truth is that you can't play .ogg and getting caching files without
> changing aRts. There are three options:
>
>  - work on code in the CVS to get caching .ogg files in the next release
>    (KDE3.2, arts-1.2.0)

Hardly an option as I find arts code extremely hard to read (I tried to when I 
searched for another bug) and also I need to remain compatible with both KDE 
3.0 and 3.1.
So I need another solution anyway and I don't want to do the work twice :)

>  - write your own module that plays .ogg files and does caching (this is
> not too hard using DataHandles, I can give you detailed instructions if you
> want to) ; however you then depend on APIs that are not frozen, that is,
> GSL APIs ; this can be loaded into the server

This sounds interesting. Yes, please give me the instructions so that I can 
have a look (and hopefully complete this task within 2 weeks, as we'll 
release then :)).

>  - do _not_ use .ogg files but .wav files ; I know that this sounds
> suboptimal, but at least then you get caching

Not an option. We have a couple of speech files and several sound effects - 
the number will rather increase.

On
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/books/kde-2.0-development/ch14lev1sec4.html
I once read about the ByteSoundProducer stuff. Is that still supported? Would 
that be an option?
This would mostly mean dropping arts, which I hate to do (as I don't like 
sound programming), but I that would be my last option then :-(

> Hope this helps.

Thanks :) At least now I know that I'll never find the solution :)

>    Cu... Stefan

CU
Andi