[pulseaudio-discuss] Make discoverable PA network sound devices available locally results in huge network traffic

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Maarten Bosmans at 26/01/11 10:49 did gyre and gimble:
> 2011/1/22 Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie>:
>> 'Twas brillig, and Maarten Bosmans at 22/01/11 10:11 did gyre and gimble:
>>> It turns out that (without pavucontrol loaded) starting an audio
>>> stream on the client on the tunnel sink, makes the audio stream over
>>> the network and stopping the program that is playing the music stop
>>> the network usage again. So far so good, nothing unexpected. When
>>> pavucontrol is opened, there is still no network usage. After playing
>>> audio and then stopping the playback, the network usage does not stop,
>>> however, until alsa pavucontrol is closed.
>>>
>>> So it seems that the source ouput of pavucontrol on the tunnel sink
>>> monitor keeps the sink from suspending. (but only when the sink had
>>> been running before, so the transition running -> idle is prevented)
>>
>> Very interesting. I wonder if it relates to the use or implementation of
>> the DONT_INHIBIT_AUTO_SUSPEND flag... looking at the pavucontrol code,
>> it seems it doesn't actually even pass
>> PA_STREAM_DONT_INHIBIT_AUTO_SUSPEND, so perhaps the solution is really
>> simple... just add that flag (although perhaps we'd have to deal with it
>> a bit more intelligently).
> 
> Yup, adding that flag does the trick, see attached patch. Thanks for
> the pointer.
> I couldn't resist removing some duplicate code, I hope that's OK. If
> not, I'll prepare a patch which only adds the flag.

I've not looked properly yet, but I'm sure it's fine to de-dupe the code
a bit. I've only really hacked on top and not really done any major
re-factoring myself.

>> I actually wonder if this is the cause of the vumeters sometimes not
>> initialising properly at times... (I presume other people see this
>> occasionally? It's never quite bothered me enough to look into it properly!)
> 
> Well, I was pleasantly surprised to see that pavucontrol from git
> master worked a lot better than the version packaged on Ubuntu
> (0.9.9). I'll use the newest version for a while and look out for
> little problems like you described.

Yeah I've been meaning to push out a new release at some point (Lennart
asked me a while back to handle that but I said I'd happily hack on it
and let him do the releases, but I'll probably just take over the
releases now :D)

I spent some time adding support for automatic reconnection in the event
the daemon disappears (as it's handy to debug and closing and reopening
pavucontrol was always a pain!) and I also added a "rename" option allow
for device.description to be edited (and with module-device-manager,
this should be saved permanently).

So a few nice features in there.

But I'm surprised Ubuntu has 0.9.9... 0.9.10 has been out for ages...

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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