tuxradar's map of linux audio

Reece Dunn msclrhd at googlemail.com
Fri Apr 9 05:25:46 CDT 2010


On 9 April 2010 11:04, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
> This seemed like a useful overview of how the various layers relate to
> each other:
> http://tuxradar.com/content/how-it-works-linux-audio-explained

This is somewhat confusing:

*  PulseAudio is an audio mixer that provides a finer grained control
over volume (being able to set it per-application), etc.

*  GStreamer is not solving the same problem as PulseAudio (PulseAudio
is not a multimedia framework). GStreamer adds support for playing,
synchronising and encoding audio and video media so is fulfilling a
different role in the audio landscape -- you cannot decode ogg files
directly through PulseAudio, for example.

*  The Xine framework is like GStreamer and FFmpeg/MPlayer. AFAICS,
this is independant of GStreamer and thus sits on top of PulseAudio,
ALSA, Jack, etc. I can't see anything that says that xine-lib calls
into GStreamer.

*  Phonon is an API that abstracts the multimedia frameworks and sits
on top of either GStreamer or Xine (or other supported backends), with
Xine being the default.

- Reece



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