[pulseaudio-discuss] Devices with dynamic capabilities (HDMI) - revisited

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Thu, 2013-01-17 at 15:14 +0100, David Henningsson wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Two months since PulseConf, and 3.0 is out there. So, time to start 
> thinking again about what we talked about at PulseConf.
> 
> So, on my TODO list were separate cards for HDMI. According to Arun's 
> report, the conclusion was to use "dynamic profiles" and have the card 
> always present. I don't remember exactly why though.

Me neither.

> Anyway, I'm proposing that cards are dynamically added and removed as 
> HDMI monitors are plugged in and out, for the following reasons:
> 
>   1) An HDMI monitor is a lot like a USB card in that sense that it 
> affects the streaming capabilities. Assuming we add some part of the ELD 
> info as the card name, it enables us to save information per monitor 
> rather than per output, so that, e g, when a user's laptop is connected 
> to his TV at home, audio gets rerouted, but not when he's connecting to 
> his projector at work, or something like that.
> 
>   2) As we then won't have four always-present cards/sinks/ports which 
> are unavailable [1], my argument for hiding unavailable ports in the GUI 
> is no longer valid; we could potentially make them grey instead.
> 
>   3) Last but not least, no GUIs currently support "dynamic profiles" 
> and I hate breaking other stuff. But as they already deal with USB 
> cards, this new feature will not mean any new logic for them.

I don't have anything against your proposal.

Getting slightly off-topic: if a computer has two hdmi ports, would one
hdmi monitor be always recognized as the same card, or would it get two
entries in the card database if it is sometimes connected to one hdmi
port and sometimes to the other?

-- 
Tanu