[pulseaudio-discuss] Is there a simple way to run old games with low latency sound?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 05.01.10 08:54, Bill Cox (waywardgeek at gmail.com) wrote:

> On some mailing lists, I've read that some users avoid PA partly
> because older games they like to play wind up having delayed sound.  I
> would guess that there is a way to configure PA for specific
> applications that run in user space to run with lower latency.  First,
> how would I do that for a specific game?  Is it possible for me  to
> write a PA module that reads a simple list of such executables, and
> configures them all to be low-latency?  I know that speech-dispatcher
> had a major problem with latency in PA until we rewrote the PA driver
> to use the pulse-simple interface, and then set tlength to a lower
> number.  Would it be possible to modify such paramters in a module for
> apps in my low-latency list?

Fiddling with the latency has an influence on the buffering
metrics. That means that both the client and the server need to be
aware of that. That means the latency data needs to come from the
client side, and then passed on to the server, since that is the usual
flow for latency control information.

I think what would make sense is to have a PULSE_LATENCY env var that
can be used to override whatever the app specifies as latency.  Should
be reasonably easy to implement in libpulse.

Unless someone beats me to it I will implement this eventually. I have
created a bug for that a while back so that I won't forget this.

http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/753

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4