[Bug 10495] Wine should support PulseAudio

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495





--- Comment #110 from Aigars Mahinovs <aigarius at gmail.com>  2009-06-17 00:35:40 ---
(In reply to comment #106)
> > Pulseaudio is far superior to dmix from the end-user functionality
> 
> Not for Wine (currently), nor is that an issue relating to this bug. It's not
> developer-friendly. Your discussion of end-user features is irrelevant to this
> discussion.

You contradict yourself just a few lines down where you talk about latency.
Pulseaudio provides what is desired by users, so a suggestion to just disable
it to run Wine is likely to be greeted just like a suggestion to just disable X
and run Wine in a framebuffer.

> > All other options that we currently have in
> > Linux do not even come close.
> 
> So fix it. Write a per-stream volume control plugin for ALSA/dmix or JACK.

That is not possible - an ALSA device changing the amount of mixers it has at
runtime will break all kinds of funny things. And why should I write a
completely new sound driver in the kernel or a subsystem in Jack just because
you don't want to accept a new feature or a subsystem in Wine?

> > JACK is only needed for sound editing, where you must have guaranteed real-time
> > latency (which Wine does not provide anyway)
> 
> Wine's support for latency is not the real issue here, nor are you correct
> about JACK *only* being needed for sound editing, but that's all off-topic
> here.

And yet you bring up latency as the reason why adding PulseAudio to the stack
is unacceptable and do not provide an example of widespread Jack use outside
audio editing circles.

> > and it is possible that FPS
> > players could benefit by disabling PA and using ALSA directly to gain a few
> > miliseconds in audio latency. However for the rest of Wine users PulseAudio is
> > the ultimate option in usability.
> 
> Not when it doesn't work.

PulseAudio works just fine. It has far less bugs than ESD had when driver for
it was introduced into Wine.

> And "a few milliseconds" is much more significant
> than you may think, especially when it's adding to already existing latency
> issues (which is the current problem with winealsa and plug pulse).

And if that is so, then no pro-gamer would choose Wine anyway, so why cater to
them?

> Regardless, you're not adding much (if anything) to this discussion ... Which
> option are you voting for, the "winepulse driver" option or the "fix winealsa"
> option?

I *advocate* that both bugs - the wishlist bug of a new driver for pulse and a
bug that wine uses nonsafe ALSA API should be fixed.

With the way Ubuntu and Fedora are pushing for PulseAudio, I would not be
surprised if the respective maintainers would pick this patch up and apply it
in these distributions, regardless of your personal opinion on the matter. It
would be better if such features were included and cleaned up upstream,
however.

-- 
Configure bugmail: http://bugs.winehq.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
Do not reply to this email, post in Bugzilla using the
above URL to reply.
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are watching all bug changes.