[MPlayer-dev-eng] [patch] prefer ALSA over OSS

[Ivan Kalvachev]

2007/5/1, Jan Knutar <jknutar at nic.fi>:
> On Sunday 29 April 2007 10:50, Attila Kinali wrote:
>
> > Hmm.. if you think that ALSA has improved conciderabily
> > in the last year, then i will try it again.
> > However, if this is really the case, the it's too early
> > for MPlayer to change the default. There are too many
> > people out there who use two year old kernels, just
> > because they didn't want to upgrade their distro.
>
> The alsa situation has improved considerably in MPlayer after Clemens
> began fixing it, though it still does some fun things that maybe could
> be improved. For example with my no-name USB audio device I get by
> default a 10 second buffer, which is maybe a bit too much ;-) -abs 1
> fixes, of course.

Let's give my enlightening on the subject.

ALSA project gains support because it have properly working kernel
drivers, while the OSS one are virtually unmaintained.

However the situation with MPlayer is more than emblematic. We got
descent alsa support only after ALSA developer came and reworked the
driver. It comes to show that to use alsa _properly_ you must become
ALSA developer or at least hire one.

The OSS Emulation works very well, because it is written by ALSA
developers and it is in the kernel.
However I've seen scared users that see huge warning that their
program is obsolete because it uses OSS and may die horrible death at
any moment. Surprisingly even such subversive tactics doesn't make OSS
go away. (#mplayer channel 2006-12-24 user  <Petina>  distribution
FedoraCore4, luckily I've never seen it on my distro, or I would have
dismissed alsa at once.:)

ALSA project haven't publically documented the API they use to
communicate with the ALSA kernel modules. So it is not standard and
ALSA could decide to change it at any moment.
Well, maybe they don't want to make it standard because it is so
horribly designed that only their library could handle it. (And one
can only imagine how horrible the kernel API could be, given how
horrible the library is...)
I can't disprove such argument. ;)

And to no surprise a lot of arguments here are repeat of the arguments
in lkml from 1 year ago, started by the same flame person. And there
are even better arguments against libalsa...
The mere fact that Clemens who is ALSA and MPlayer developer doesn't
take any part of this flame comes to show how pointless this thread
is.


http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/6/484
http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=5 (oh, ye, i think I've also hit
the locale bug. oh and could somebody give me good tutorial on lisp, i
want to write few alsa config files ;)