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

[Vladimir Mosgalin]

Hi Rich Felker!

 On 2007.05.04 at 11:03:52 -0400, Rich Felker wrote next:

> > you probably think that surround sound is always unnecessary,
> 
> Of course I know it's always unnecessary.

I won't discuss this because there is no reason to, can you just think
"most people want it so it has to be possible" then?

> At least 100 seek operations on the media. Seek times in reality are
> nowhere near as low as disk manufacturers advertise.

You can easly check that. Actually, most benchmark on hardware sites
already do. They aren't as low, but they are similar. They won't get
much lower than they are now, however solid drives are coming, they'll
solve this problem.

> No, all the DVD-sized videos I have don't need postprocessing because
> the people who encoded them are competent.

You are too naive. I can't believe you. Don't you know how many ways to
destroy video exist?

> If it runs nicely on old computers it will also run nicely (even
> better) on new computers. The converse does not hold.

Unfortunately, this is wrong. If new computers are MUCH newer, this
won't be the case. Think of surround sound as of upgrade of old stereo -
you won't get surround just because you had working stereo. You won't
get hardware 3d acceleration which is present on every computer nowadays
when you run old software designed for software 3d rendering on some
very old system. You won't be able to run i386 binary on pure amd64
system without multilib, and so on.

> It is MPlayer's bug! The application must choose and configure a
> sample format, sample rate, etc. compatible with the device. If
> MPlayer fails to do this then it's broken.

Why use oss if it implies such hard work on application? mplayer may be
fine, what about all other applications that want to output sound? _Why_
should they support all this? And if they won't, they won't work with a
lot of sound hardware. It's easier to use alsa.

> Curses windows/panels are disgusting bloat. It's like saving an image

But they work

> of your window contents in an XPixmap and blitting it on window-expose
> events instead of processing the expose event and redrawing!

That's exactly how it works, at least sometimes! Ever heard of
backingstore?

> No, it supports fake bidi by outputting the characters in backwards
> order. This is absolutely wrong and will break copy&paste as well as
> breaking any correct terminal with implicit bidi (like mlterm) as the
> default mode. It also has no hope of working with arabic shaping, only
> with hebrew.
> 
> Bidi is a real mess and hell to support. Thankfully, implicit bidi
> will work for _some_ apps, but it also breaks a lot of things. :(

I take your word for that, however apparently you haven't studied vim
docs well enough. :help arabicshape and :help arabic.txt

-- 

Vladimir