[pulseaudio-discuss] Moving sources and sinks

[Nikolai Beier]

2008/5/4 Tomas Carnecky <tom at dbservice.com>:
> Colin Guthrie wrote:
>  > Tomas Carnecky wrote:
>  >> Colin Guthrie wrote:
>  >>> I disagree that this community is unresponsive. You just have to be
>  >>> patient. Lennart is the main developer but he does not sit slavishly
>  >>> reading the mailing list and responding immediately. He'll usually have
>  >>> a big purge every couple weeks, but generally does respond to almost
>  >>> everyone who asks something, unless someone else has jumped in already.
>  >> PulseAudio + Wine is still a big no-no. Like described in my earlier
>  >> mail to this mailing list (sent 24.2.2008) I've come to a point where I
>  >> don't know any further and asked for help. Nobody answered. Not even to
>  >> the ticket in PA trac or the ticket in the alsa bugtracker.
>  >>
>  >> Ubuntu now ships with PA enabled by default, which causes big troubles
>  >> for those wanting to play games under Wine. I know the best solution
>  >> would be to have a native PA driver in Wine, but that won't happen
>  >> anytime soon. There are bugs in the pulse alsa driver. Fixing those
>  >> shouldn't be such big problem for someone familiar with the inner
>  >> workings of PA.
>  >
>  > What are the bugs in the pulse alsa plugin you refer to? There are some
>  > feature limitations but they are typically down to what any ioplug
>  > plugin is capable of.
>
>  https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=2601 (see the
>  comments made by wereHamster, that's me).
>
>  http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/198
>
>
>  > When I last looked at the wine alsa layer it was *really* nasty. It
>  > didn't even open the "default" device, it would instead try to open
>  > "default:0".... I think it was cleaned up a bit, but it should be very
>  > simple for someone to rewrite it or write a direct pulse driver. The
>  > main wine folks don't use PA so don't really care about this.
>   >
>  > If there is something in pulse that can be fixed, it shoudl be reported,
>  > but as tonnes of apps out there work fine with pulse+alsa, I suspect
>  > strongly (and this is based on actually having a quick peak at the code
>  > a while back) that the problems lie at the wine end.
>
>  There may be applications that work fine, but you only have to find a
>  single app that works with native alsa and fails with alsa-pulse
>  emulation to prove that there's a bug in your code. Wine is probably one
>  of the more complex users of the alsa API, and therefore exposing bugs
>  in alsa-pulse that other applications don't hit.
>
>  I have patched the Wine alsa driver and the alsa-pulse plugin and sound
>  works for me, tested in World of Warcraft and foobar2000. The Wine patch
>  maybe isn't necessary. But the patch to alsa-pulse is required, see my
>  comments in the alsa bugtracker or the PA ticket.

This case is a bit confusing. I have tried to look at the realted bug
reports this morning. (nothing seemed to have happened since
February).
There are mentioned two patches for Wine that should fix some of the
problems, like the bad hard coded defaults on names for default
devices and volume controls. (here: pulseaudio.org/ticket/198 and
winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2008-February/050561.html ). I
wonder if they are included now? (Really a question for people working
on the wine code)

What about Wines OSS and ESD output? If they work, it could be
recommended to try these if alsa output does not work.

Note that there are reported separate problems with DirectSound


Because Wine is not "just working" (or has been working badly
recently) it also deserves to be mentioned at the wiki at
pulseaudio.org (So I'll try to do that).

-- 
Nikolai Beier