alsasink pause

[Robert Rosengren]

Hi,

I noticed that when pausing an audio pipeline ending up in the alsasink, the sink itself does not care about state changes. Should the alsasink actually pause the ALSA device upon a pausing the pipeline? The benefit would be if the ALSA-device have configured long buffers/latency, the audio would be paused instantly instead of playing until buffer is empty. 

Looking into the code of gstalsasink, there does not seem to exist any callbacks from gstaudiosink notifying on pause and gstalsasink has not registered for change_state callbacks. Which mechanism would be the appropriate way for gstalsasink to handle pause?

Not all ALSA devices support pause, and this should be retrieved from ALSA layer. In addition, one might want to be able to configure this via property.

Does this sound like a good idea, or is there any pitfalls by actually pausing/resuming ALSA device?

BR, Robert