[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio Mini-Conference: Call for topics

[David Henningsson]

Ok, I'll start with some topics I would like to have discussed and/or 
decided upon at our conference.

  * PulseAudio - vision and mission

What do we want PulseAudio to be? What are we working for? How important 
is it for us to be the standard sound server in desktop/laptop as well 
as the embedded distributions? Other important use cases for PulseAudio? 
Are some distributions more important than others? Can we unify our 
visions for where we see PulseAudio in a few years time?

  * Routing priority list infrastructure - kick off the implementation?

A year ago or even more, Colin Guthrie had some ideas [1] on how to 
improve the routing infrastructure in PulseAudio, which I believe has 
been generally accepted, but it is still not (fully) implemented. Until 
it's there, we're hacking around the current limitations with e g 
modules such as module-switch-on-port-available, have rerouting problems 
at suspend/resume, etc. So, how do we actually get this implemented? (E 
g, maybe other people can help out if Colin does not have time to do the 
implementation?)

  * Improving low latency behaviour

Discussion about how we can make PulseAudio perform better in low 
latency scenarios, such as VOIP or gaming. In particular, the issue of 
latency increasing over time (as occasional underruns occur) should be 
somehow resolved. I have an idea here.

  * Better drain/underrun reporting behaviour

We more than once has got reports that 1) drains take seconds too long 
to complete 2) underruns are reported before all samples sent have been 
actually played back, and sometimes a audio glitch can be avoided even 
when an underrun has been reported to the client. Can we get almost 
sample accuracy on when we report back that underrun/drain has occurred?

  * Devices with dynamic capabilities (e g HDMI)

HDMI in particular can change its PCM capabilities, i e, maybe you first 
have one monitor connected that supports 5.1 LPCM, and you then unplug 
and plug in another one that only supports stereo. How do we 
update/reprobe/etc PulseAudio accordingly to support this?


-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
https://launchpad.net/~diwic

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/RFC/PriorityRouting