[pulseaudio-discuss] Moving sources and sinks

[Tomas Carnecky]

Nikolai Beier wrote:
> 2008/5/4 Tomas Carnecky <tom at dbservice.com>:
>> Colin Guthrie wrote:
>>  > Tomas Carnecky wrote:
>>  >> Colin Guthrie wrote:
>>  >>> I disagree that this community is unresponsive. You just have to be
>>  >>> patient. Lennart is the main developer but he does not sit slavishly
>>  >>> reading the mailing list and responding immediately. He'll usually have
>>  >>> a big purge every couple weeks, but generally does respond to almost
>>  >>> everyone who asks something, unless someone else has jumped in already.
>>  >> PulseAudio + Wine is still a big no-no. Like described in my earlier
>>  >> mail to this mailing list (sent 24.2.2008) I've come to a point where I
>>  >> don't know any further and asked for help. Nobody answered. Not even to
>>  >> the ticket in PA trac or the ticket in the alsa bugtracker.
>>  >>
>>  >> Ubuntu now ships with PA enabled by default, which causes big troubles
>>  >> for those wanting to play games under Wine. I know the best solution
>>  >> would be to have a native PA driver in Wine, but that won't happen
>>  >> anytime soon. There are bugs in the pulse alsa driver. Fixing those
>>  >> shouldn't be such big problem for someone familiar with the inner
>>  >> workings of PA.
>>  >
>>  > What are the bugs in the pulse alsa plugin you refer to? There are some
>>  > feature limitations but they are typically down to what any ioplug
>>  > plugin is capable of.
>>
>>  https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=2601 (see the
>>  comments made by wereHamster, that's me).
>>
>>  http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/198
>>
>>
>>  > When I last looked at the wine alsa layer it was *really* nasty. It
>>  > didn't even open the "default" device, it would instead try to open
>>  > "default:0".... I think it was cleaned up a bit, but it should be very
>>  > simple for someone to rewrite it or write a direct pulse driver. The
>>  > main wine folks don't use PA so don't really care about this.
>>   >
>>  > If there is something in pulse that can be fixed, it shoudl be reported,
>>  > but as tonnes of apps out there work fine with pulse+alsa, I suspect
>>  > strongly (and this is based on actually having a quick peak at the code
>>  > a while back) that the problems lie at the wine end.
>>
>>  There may be applications that work fine, but you only have to find a
>>  single app that works with native alsa and fails with alsa-pulse
>>  emulation to prove that there's a bug in your code. Wine is probably one
>>  of the more complex users of the alsa API, and therefore exposing bugs
>>  in alsa-pulse that other applications don't hit.
>>
>>  I have patched the Wine alsa driver and the alsa-pulse plugin and sound
>>  works for me, tested in World of Warcraft and foobar2000. The Wine patch
>>  maybe isn't necessary. But the patch to alsa-pulse is required, see my
>>  comments in the alsa bugtracker or the PA ticket.
> 
> This case is a bit confusing. I have tried to look at the realted bug
> reports this morning. (nothing seemed to have happened since
> February).

Yeah, because I posted all I know, my patches etc, and I've been waiting 
for someone familiar with the inner workings of PA to comment on the 
issues. As I said, sound in Wine works for me, but the patches I'm using 
  I consider hacks and not a real solution.

> There are mentioned two patches for Wine that should fix some of the
> problems, like the bad hard coded defaults on names for default
> devices and volume controls. (here: pulseaudio.org/ticket/198 and
> winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2008-February/050561.html ). I
> wonder if they are included now? (Really a question for people working
> on the wine code)

The first issue with the device names seems to be fixed. As of March 4, 
2008 Wine uses "default" instead of "default:0". The only patch to Wine 
I'm using now is the one I posted to wine-patches. That one was not 
merged into Wine - I haven't asked why. I'm not even sure it's 
necessary. I'll test without my Wine patch to confirm that. But the 
biggest problem seems to be the delay/latency computation in the 
alsa-pulse plugin.

> What about Wines OSS and ESD output? If they work, it could be
> recommended to try these if alsa output does not work.

I disabled OSS support in my kernel, so I can't test paoss. It might 
work, but it would still be a workaround and not a real fix.

> Note that there are reported separate problems with DirectSound

Where did you see that? Where can I read more about that?

tom