[gst-devel] spider restart

[Giuliano Pochini]

On 28-Jun-2004 Martin Soto wrote:

> Well, development manpower is always limited. People will usually do
> their best to help you, but there are no warranties. I'd also like to
> see my project (a DVD player) go faster, but already had to make a few
> fixes and improvements to GStreamer (and spend time learning the
> internals and doing the work) in order to get things to work the way I
> want. It is like that with every free software project you rely on:
> either you accept all limitations as they come, or you fix them
> yourself. Whining and screaming won't help at all...

I'm not whining. I'm reporting bugs.


>> - Random audio skips with alsasink (I'm trying to narrow
>> this down before filing a bug report because it's strange.
>> Alsasink sometimes stops the substream, sets again the
>> hw_params and restarts the substream. Perhaps is it an
>> incorrect out-of-data condition detection ?).
>
> Are you using kernel 2.6, by the way? Under relatively moderate load
> conditions, I've been noticing skips in all Alsa based applications,
> including XMMS. An interesting thing is that playing through the ALSA
> OSS emulation works flawlessly.

Yes, 2.6.7. I had a look at the alsasink stuff and the implementation
is -uhm- not excellent, expecially the underrun recovery stuff. Before
fixing that, I'm trying to figure out why it underruns, because with
large buffers and no load it should never happen.


> It seems that the sound interface
> returns funny values some times, because applications seem to be
> confused. XMMS, for example, jumps back and forth before settling down,
> and I wouldn't be surprised to know that the behavior you're seeing in
> alsasink has the same cause.

Xmms and others run flawlessly here. Setting nice -20 I can use
*very* short buffers (I mean less than 1ms) with very few xruns
and high load. I can't see any valid reason why gstreamer fails
with buffers longer that half second.


> I brought the issue some days ago to the Alsa mailing list, but no one
> seemed to have a satisfactory answer. You may search the archives from
> the last days, thought. I haven't checked in the last couple of weeks.

I'm using alsa-driver-1.0.5a and alsa-lib-1.0.5, not the version that
comes with the kernel.


--
Giuliano.