MAS in KDE

[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 01:21:22AM +0100, Tim Jansen wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 March 2003 01:07, Navindra Umanee wrote:
> > Isn't this too much?  Aren't any time benefits with MAS going to get
> > killed with all these wrappers?
> 
> Yes, all the nifty network transparency stuff wouldnt work anymore, because 
> CSL delivers raw, uncompressed sound data to MAS. In the best case MAS has to 
> re-encode it.

The point is that 99% of all KDE desktops run locally and locally only. I am
not saying that this is a reason to intentionally avoid making it work
remotely. Its just that I am saying that its not so important that it works
sane remotely, than that it works sane locally.

Currently, every instance of noatun and knotify breaks in the remote case,
because we don't stream data in there, but tell the artsd process to open
the data locally. This issue has been around since KDE1.9x or something like
this.

I think I've got approximately three mails complaining or wondering about
this, and that was it, whereas for other issues, I've got a lot of complaints
until finally somebody sent me a patch. An example would be: aRts/KDE can't
interoperate with ESound, which is now fixed in the CVS.

I am thus trying to get an idea what our users really need, and then propose
implementing things on these observations. And my current observation is:
users want to have KDE more independant of aRts, because

 - sometime, other media servers (like MAS) might be an intersting target to
   run KDE with
 - aRts might be too heavy for their hardware (like iPAQ)
 - their hardware driver already does mixing (like ALSA)
 - they want interoperability with other apps at no extra costs (like ESound/
   Gnome/GStreamer/Jack interoperability)

Thus, I think shipping CSL or maybe PortAudio with KDE3.2, and an appropriate
KDE API on top of this will give us more flexibility and more interoperability
for not too much costs.

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