Review Request: Phonon KDED module: Improve finding virtual devices from ALSA

[Casian Andrei]

-----------------------------------------------------------
This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/100700/
-----------------------------------------------------------

Review request for KDE Runtime, Phonon, Phonon Backends, Harald Sitter, and Trever Fischer.


Summary
-------

Modifications on findVirtualDevices in PhononServer, to make it find usable capture devices for Phonon-VLC, at least. Phonon audio capture works with the provided devices. Also made a couple of mostly irelevant improvements.

The Phonon KDED module was not providing any usable capture devices. Only some iec958 digital devices showed up, which didn't work at all. VLC needs a default analog ALSA device, like hw:CARD=SB, in my case.

Solid is not returning any audio devices on my system. I do not know if it works properly on other systems, but I will investigate further.

This is the commit message:

Phonon KDED module: Improve finding virtual devices from ALSA
    
    PhononServer was not finding any usable capture devices. It
    was skipping almost all useful devices. Commented out the
    block for skipping those.
    
    Prevent devices with empty names when their description
    is empty. This should not happen, but it's just in case.
    
    Eliminate any front, center, rear, surround virtual devices from
    capture device candidates.
    
    Additionaly, there will be only one device with an unique id, with
    one or more access descriptors.
    
    Replace default: with hw: for capture devices, to enable capture
    working with Phonon-VLC.

Because Solid doesn't give me any audio devices, I cannot test for the cases when it actually works. However, I believe that it doesn't work on most systems.

The other iec958 digital stuff devices show up as advanced.


Diffs
-----

  phonon/kded-module/phononserver.cpp 44f857e 

Diff: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/100700/diff


Testing
-------

Restarted KDED and ran kcmshell4 phonon, viewed the audio devices. All looks ok. No bogus devices.

Tested the capture demos from Phonon (currently they have a buggy interface, will be fixed), and they worked fine. Audio capture works ok with the Phonon-VLC backend. Audio-video capture also works if you get around the demo's interface bugs. 

Don't know what happens when Solid actually works for audio devices, if these changes interfere with Phonon's functionality in that case.
Not tested on other systems to see if any bogus devices appear out of nowhere.

Amarok still works :P


Screenshots
-----------

Capture devices in Phonon config
  http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/100700/s/79/


Thanks,

Casian

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/phonon-backends/attachments/20110221/9b0f4e16/attachment.htm