[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Bill Cox at 02/01/10 15:03 did gyre and gimble:
> Hi, David.
> 
> On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 1:08 AM, David Henningsson
> <launchpad.web at epost.diwic.se> wrote:
>> I was just thinking, and this idea is perhaps not 100% thought through,
>> but it could be worth considering.
>>
>> We have this hand-over mechanism:
>>
>> http://git.0pointer.de/?p=reserve.git;a=blob_plain;f=reserve.txt
> 
> You obviously know more about the plumbing than I do!  I don't know
> anything about d-bus, so my opinion counts little, but it looks like a
> good direction to me.  I would want to bury all the complexity of
> dealing with d-bus under the pulse-simple API, so that only a one-line
> change has to be made to clients like speakup/espeakup and
> speakup/speechd-up.
> 
> I'm not quite sure how this works.  When a speakup client wants access
> to the sound card, it could request access at high priority, and then
> plays it's sound.  How would it hand back the sound card to the other
> user and uncork it?  If this were automatic once the queue was empty
> for say one second, that would be great.  Is this the sort of thing we
> can do with PA/CK?

While this would theoretically work, I think it's probably not needed.
The reservation system is really meant for interacting with jack and
while it's not exclusive, I think it's not really an appropriate
technique to solve this problem.

I think the general concept of the speech dispatchers running as a
system service is the bit that needs re-thought and that adding hooks to
consolekit (if they don't exist) and the concept of an "idle user" are
probably more practical long term solutions.

Of course I could be wrong on that front :p

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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