KDE4 MM, a view from usability and general applicaiton development

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi Arnold,

On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 21:13, Arnold Krille wrote:
> Starting Disclaimer:
> I am neither a professional audio engineer, nor a professional programmer, nor 
> a kde core developer. I am just using audio apps semi-professional and 
> programming some little, but imho useful tools...

That's ok, none of us claims to be professional. ;).

> On Wednesday 08 September 2004 16:36, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
[..]
> And afaik if a system is optimized for doing video and audio in sync (where 
> latency is irrelevant as long as both act the same time), you have so much 
> work to do in your process, that its _very_ likely you don't have the time to 
> do 5 or more process-switches for audio and some for for the other programs 
> running and having a over-all-latency of 3-5ms.

But there are no process switches needed for this. You simply have a
central clock that one element (the master clock, mostly audio element)
exposes to the other elements, and the other elements wait for this
clock for playback of their video frames. That is all. There is no
process switching, sleep, conditional waiting or anything needed. Some
implementations don't even require thread locking (which is just for
theoretical thread safety; in practice, this doesn't hurt performance at
all).

Ronald

-- 
Ronald S. Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>