[pulseaudio-discuss] Windows binaries

[Maarten Bosmans]

2011/2/27 Sean McNamara <smcnam at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 8:28 AM, Maarten Bosmans <mkbosmans at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As the patches that make it possible to build pulse on win32 should
>> land in master any moment now, I thought it would be a good time to
>> make the binaries available for download.
>
> This is amazing work! I'm able to play audio from Ubuntu to Win32 over
> a gigabit ethernet crossover cable (to spare the latency of the
> router), using Ubuntu 11.04 on the Linux side. No dropouts. I remember
> doing this a long time ago, but it wasn't nearly as reliable or
> robust. I've tested several simultaneous streams, with no detectable
> problems, with Synergy desktop sharing going over the same connection.

That's good to hear.

> I set it up for module-native-tcp, with auth_anonymous, because anyone
> connecting from an unauthorized source (i.e. outside of my network)
> would hit my router's NAT and be ignored, so...
>
> My suggestion for generating default configs would be to load
> module-waveout and module-native-protocol-tcp. You may as well not
> include "auth_anonymous=1" by default, but leave a line with an
> explanation to enable it if you're behind a firewall and want to play
> audio between computers on the LAN.

Well, enabling auth-anonymous by default is a bit too much I think.
Even if we from the Linux view think Windows is less secure, we can at
least take our security-mindedness with us when porting software to
other platforms. I'm OK with a commented out line, together with a
little explanation, but throwing your audio on the network by default
for anyone to hear is not good IMHO. Installing pulse on Windows is
not completely straightforward anyway, so I think we may expect some
tweaking of the config from the user.

> The only strange thing I hit is that starting PA caused Windows to
> change my default Windows Audio playback device. I have quite a few
> because I've got a USB webcam with a mic, a Virtual Audio Cable, a
> Radeon card's HDMI, and onboard HD Audio. It selected the Virtual
> Audio Cable as default for unknown reasons when I started PA for the
> first time. (This is on Windows 7 x64).

Do you mean that other software than pulse suddenly also had a
different default device?
I presume you don't have a device parameter set for module-waveout. In
the case pulse uses the WAVE_MAPPER constant, which is the Windows
default device. If you have any ideas on how to do it better, comments
(or even better: patches) are welcome.

> Thank you so much! :))
>
> -Sean

Maarten