[MPlayer-dev-eng] audio_out.c question

[Mitch Golden]

On Wed, 22 Mar 2006, Rich Felker wrote:

> Because the native drivers work correctly and the wrappers are buggy
> crap that lead to a/v desync and all sorts of nasty problems. However
> on some broken systems the wrappers like arts/esd take control of the
> sound device and won't let anything else use it, and in this case we
> either have to use arts/esd or put up with users whining incessantly
> because they can't figure out they need to killall -9 arts/esd or
> better yet rm them..

Peace.  I hope that you understand that my motive here is not to waste 
anyone's time on this list nor be a noob or a pain in the ass.  I am 
motivated here simply that I like mplayer and want to make it easier for 
people to use it without seeing crashes or inexplicable popups.  I joined 
this dev list to offer to help make it better, as I have done for many 
other projects.  If users are whining and getting confused, perhaps 
there's something simple that could be done to mplayer to make it easier 
for them.

I would point out is that it's not artsd that takes control of /dev/dsp, 
but rather that no two applications can have /dev/dsp open at once - not 
even two separate instances of mplayer.  In that regard, the thing that is 
broken is OSS really.  As I understand it, that issue was one of the major 
reasons that alsa was written.

So, my question is this:

Is there any issue with using alsa in preference to OSS, at least for 
audio only files?  As you say, artsd is not necessary and doesn't improve 
anything, so keeping it at the bottom of the list is fine.  Does alsa 
cause the desync problem as well?  My understanding is that it's 
implemented at the kernel level just as OSS is.

Assuming that changing the default is impossible, I'd suggest that the 
messaging in gmplayer be changed not to produce the popup when it succeeds 
in playing through its second or third choice rather than OSS.  To the 
casual user, the popup looks like something has failed, but then the 
player inexplicably goes on to play everything fine.

I could also improve the message when it does crash on unpause, so that 
it's clear that what happened is that some other application has grabbed 
the audio device.

   - Mitch Golden