[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH] loopback: underrun_protection argument

[Raman Shishniou]

On 02/15/2018 12:43 PM, Georg Chini wrote:
> On 15.02.2018 10:31, Raman Shishniou wrote:
>> On 02/15/2018 10:20 AM, Georg Chini wrote:
>>> On 14.02.2018 22:51, Raman Shishniou wrote:
>>>> On 02/14/2018 07:20 PM, Georg Chini wrote:
>>>>> On 14.02.2018 15:25, Raman Shyshniou wrote:
>>>>>> This patch adds a underrun_protection argument to
>>>>>> control underrun protection algorithm. Disabling
>>>>>> protection will keep loopback latency regardless
>>>>>> of underruns.
>>>>> Again I do not understand the motivation of the patch.
>>>>> In what situations are you seeing so many underruns and
>>>>> still want to keep the original configured latency value?
>>>>> Audio will be very bad in that case.
>>>>>
>>>> All situations where where latency is more important than data integrity.
>>>> Voice over IP (telephony) for example, receiving audio data using network
>>>> by UDP/RTP. Any data loss leads to underruns in loopback module.
>>> This is not correct. It will only lead to underruns, if module-loopback runs
>>> out of data. So if you buffer enough data, missing packets in the voice
>>> stream would just appear to be small sample rate variations from the
>>> perspective of the loopback module. Because the loopback module
>>> does some adaptive re-sampling, these variations are no problem.
>>>
>>> Maybe this happens for you because module-pipe-source has no buffer
>>> at all and simply passes the values through whenever data arrives.
>>> With missing data packets, this can surely lead to underruns on the
>>> source side which are passed on to the loopback module.
>>> Perhaps you should implement some buffering in pipe-source?
>>>
>>> I don't see the point of your change. If you are seeing massive underruns,
>>> audio quality will be really bad and just sticking to the configured latency
>>> will not improve the situation. For me, the permanent occurrence of
>>> underruns shows that there is something wrong with your setup in the first
>>> place. The better idea is to correct the audio chain, so that no (or only very
>>> few) underruns happen.
>> I Agree. For live streaming or internet radio I can buffer more data up to
>> several seconds (or just use tcp). But not for telephony, where 10-20
>> underruns per hour is acceptable, but latency more than 50-100ms is not.
>> Loopback module increases latency permanently. There is no way to decrease
>> it without unload and load again.
> 
> How about a max_latency_msec argument in the sense that the logic
> will not be completely disabled, but module-loopback will not try to
> increase the latency above max_latency_msec (if specified) even if
> underruns occur?
> 

I can see that, it makes sense to me. I'll make the patch.