[MPlayer-dev-eng] audio_out.c question

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 11:26:15PM -0500, Mitch Golden wrote:
> As a practical matter I think it's clear that this stuff should be 
> configurable in mplayer, and needs to be explained to the naive user.  So 
> as far as what I'm going to code, I think I know what I need.

It is configurable. If you would like better coverage of the issues in
the manual, spend some time researching it then submit a DOCS patch.

> However, I would like to comment that I have always found it a royal 
> nuisance to use Audacity (which uses OSS) along with other player apps, 
> some of which, like mplayer, also use OSS.

Well you're welcome to put ao=alsa,... in your config file.

> All the contention for the 
> sound device is a real pain.  I have no problem in principle with saying 
> that ordinary user space apps can't open the raw device - we all agree to 
> use X (or some other such subsystem) to manage the screen.

No, we don't all agree. That's why mplayer has mga_vid and vidix which
are much faster than xv and allows users without X to play movies.

> In that sense 
> OSS is a bit of an outlier in that it really fails to manage the device.

How does it fail to manage the device? The device simply does not
support multiple ports. You can _emulate_ it but this requires
resampling (in the general case) which lowers quality, and which makes
it very hard to get the precise timing correct.

Rich