[Bug 10495] Wine should support PulseAudio

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

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





--- Comment #10 from Stefan Dösinger <stefandoesinger at gmx.at>  2007-11-19 05:35:06 ---
Teamspeak is a good point, yeah. However, often fps gamers sit in the same
room, so no need for such a chat app. (Online gaming doesn't allow proper
competitive gaming anyway due to high network latencies).

Regarding the latency of dmix and software mixing: Yes, dmix isn't any better,
but for people that need highly efficient mixing there is sound hardware that
supports hardware mixing(the usual AC97 chips don't support that). Wine
currently does not support hardware mixing due to Alsa limitations, but I doubt
a sound middleware like PA will fix that. (Lennart Poettering says it is
"bullshit" and gives the Intel HDA soundchip as an example. Gamers do not use
the HDA and AC97 chips for a reason. Gamers slap Microsoft for disallowing HW
mixing in Vista for a reason).

Even with hardware that doesn't do HW mixing, games expect to be able to mix
themselves and write the results directly to the card, bypassing any other
mixing software.

However, it sounds like PA already does what we want:

===
Gustavo brought up the issue that PA "hogs" the sound device. Sure we
do. The idea is having everything go through PA, so that we can treat
everything the same. However, since there are some APIs that are
notoriously hard to virtualize (e.g. OSS with mmap) and some areas
where you don't want the extra context-switching PA adds (pro audio,
for now), there's now a tool called "pasuspender" which when passed a
command line it will execute that, but before doing so suspend PA's
sound card access and afterwards resume it again. So, prefix your
"quake2" invocation with "pasuspender" and everything should be
fine. Also, we now close all audio devices after 1s of idle time by
default. We do this mostly to save power. However this also has the
side effect of releasing the audio device quickly for other apps. The
drawback of course is that many sound cards generate pops and clicks
everytime you open/close the device (some intel hda for example), but
that can probably be worked around in the drivers (according to
Takashi) and I guess you cannot have everything at the same time, so
power saving is more important for now. In practice you probably
shouldn't notice PA's presence at all -- unless you try to play a ALSA
stream to hw:0 and a PA stream at the same time. And last but not
least, we have been shipping a PA plugin for libasound for a while
now. It's enabled by default in F8 and redirects all ALSA audio to
PA -- unless some borked app hard codes "hw:0" as device name.
===

So we can just stick to Alsa, and the game gets direct access without delays.


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