ALSA Compress Offload support

[Arun Raghavan]

On 16 January 2015 at 17:21, Qais Yousef <qais.yousef at imgtec.com> wrote:
> On 01/13/2015 10:04 AM, Qais Yousef wrote:
>>
>>
>> Maybe I specified the wrong name. In tinycompress they open the compressed
>> device using open()[2]. I'm not familiar with alsalib and how it should
>> handle this.
>>
>> [1] http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=tinycompress.git;a=summary
>> [2]
>> http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=tinycompress.git;a=blob;f=compress.c;h=15dfdb74137ed0d1c7d65d8318391ac75ae79ee4;hb=HEAD#l240
>>
>
> OK asking on alsa mailing list [1] what alsasink currently supports is not
> what I am asking for. So back to my original question, what is the best way
> to add support for alsa compress offload in gstreamer? I'm not sure which is
> better to extend the current alsasink or create a new (calsasink?)
> component. I think the latter is better to avoid making alsasink too
> complex.
>
> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.devel/133034

IMO a separate element probably makes sense. The compress offload
devices don't work through alsa-lib at all (they use tinycompress), so
I suspect there's not a whole bunch of code to be shared.

There are a whole bunch of interesting questions around resource
management (who gets access to the decoder on the system, who mediates
that, etc.) but that's all outside the scope of GStreamer, at least
until some standard way of doing all this emerges, if it ever does.

-- Arun