[MPlayer-dev-eng] Practical outcomes of the ALSA thread

[Uoti Urpala]

On Fri, 2007-05-04 at 23:52 +0400, Vladimir Mosgalin wrote:
> NO way! This is fundamentally wrong. No application except maybe for
> sound server should EVER try to use hw devices. You'll get all the
> problems which are solved by alsa layer: no mixing and no conversion of
> sound format.

Defaulting to a hw device has problems. However the hw devices do offer
functionality which is not available with mixing. As I mentioned in
another mail they support pause and have more accurate snd_pcm_delay().
It might be possible to improve the latter in ALSA, but perfect pause
with mixing seems hard. So there is a reason why you might want to use a
hardware device with a particular program. I've configured MPlayer to
use ALSA with a hw device myself.