[pulseaudio-discuss] Windows binaries

[Sean McNamara]

Hi,

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 3:12 PM, Maarten Bosmans <mkbosmans at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree 100% that enabling auth_anonymous by default is dangerous, and
a bad practice. Obviously, there are people out there with no firewall
and a publicly-routable IP address: if PA listens on 0.0.0.0 with
auth-anonymous and m-n-tcp, a random internet passerby could mess with
their audio system. But, making auth-anonymous a suggestion in the
config is OK, imho.

It can have practical uses. For example, if you make PulseAudio bind
to an IP Address that is only accessible within a secure LAN (i.e, you
control the physical infrastructure and trust all the computers on the
LAN), this is a fairly good bet that random Internet users will not be
able to impinge on you. Only application programs running on your
trusted systems could interfere, and then, there are much more
dangerous things that an untrusted program running native code could
do, rather than play static over your PulseAudio or capture your mic.

>
>> 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.

Yes, I mean exactly that "other software than pulse suddenly also had
a different default device".

When I booted up the system, device "High Definition Audio Device",
using the "Speakers" pin, was the default device.

When I started PulseAudio, device "Virtual Audio Cable", using the
"Line 1" pin, became the default device.

In default.pa, the waveout declaration is thus:

load-module module-waveout sink_name=output source_name=input

Unfortunately I can no longer reproduce this, but I'll keep an eye out
for it happening again ...

Thanks,

Sean

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