[pulseaudio-discuss] Stuttering sound with SDL apps

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi,

I'm trying to debug an issue in Mandriva with SDL apps stuttering a lot
when outputting sound.

We are using by default the SDL's pulse output layer, but this seems to
cause significant issues. Using the ESD layer seems to be OK, but I'd
obviously like to make direct pulse output work.

Does anyone have any patches for SDL to fix this? I'd imagine it's a
buffering/sample size thing and that SDL is trying to achieve low
latency but is in actual fact starving PA. If we up the client side
buffer size in SDL apps that support this (e.g. wesnoth), the problem
goes away.

Any other distros affected?

Interestingly, when using the ASLA plugin via SDL the sound stutters in
a similar way, but the UI in pavucontrol flashes around the relevant
stream like it's constantly being torn down and reconnected. Skype also
seems to do this. I've verified that the connection *is not* being
dropped/reinitiated via paman, so perhaps it's constant tweakign
something, (e.g. the volume or stream name or something?) that
pavucontrol has to redraw the UI for? This could just be a simple bug in
pavucontrol. Anyway, this is just an aside.


Col