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

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hello,
On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 07:50:53PM +0200, Zsolt Barat wrote:
[...]
> you are suporting a stonaged driver model, which was good for simple
> audio devices but can't catch up with soundsystems we have nowadays, at
> least it didn't. it is like saying: "let's go back to a drivermodel for
> monochrome displays, because it's so simple and fits so well into the
> unix philosophy of device access"

Well, what exactly is it missing (from an API standpoint, not
implementation), and more importantly what of that could not have been
adding by improving it e.g. adding a few ioctls?
Why is it necessary to _require_ a library for doing audio, even more so
one with only one implementation and a fairly large one at that (and I
personally think the alsa API is way too complicated for doing simple
things, it is the largest ao by far without doing _that_ much more).

[...]
> At least it is true that there will be no way back OSS, and OSS will be
> removed from the kernel soon (or it is allready?). Using the
> oss-emulation-layer of ALSA just for protest is really braindead.

Until recently it did work better. And it is also true that MPlayer's
ALSA driver was highly unstable, and it required about a year, many
fixes in ALSA itself and a ALSA developer working on it to the level
where it is working better than OSS.
Maybe you really never had any problems, but I remember times where you
had to tell someone on IRC to use -srate 44100 or -srate 48000 to make
ALSA work almost daily, if you missed that completely I think you never
had to do with many ALSA users (or they were all playing content with
nice 44100 samplerate on a soundcard that had exceptional drivers and
supported all samplerates anyway).

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger