[Spice-devel] [PATCH] make celt to be optional

[David Mansfield]

On 06/14/2012 06:31 AM, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 10:14:36AM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
>> However, that is imho a different issue than the celt051 support. A new
>> release of spice client and server supporting opus does not magically
>> make old servers and client disappear, so it would still be the case
>> that e.g. debian spice client would get lame audio performance if
>> connecting to say a RHEV spice client, or if some old client connects to
>> a server running on debian. In time, it would perhaps make sense to drop
>> celt051 support, but its seems pretty bad to release a client binary
>> that doesn't do audio well with all currently existing deployed servers.
> It all depends if we consider remote SPICE access with limited bandwidth and
> with audio needed will be an important use case that must run as good as
> possible. In my opinion, sound is most of the time not the most important
> thing if what you want is a remote desktop. It also won't be really
> noticeable on LAN, or in GNOME Boxes use case, ...
>
> What I gather from this thread is that we don't want anyone to use the
> fallback PCM code, which means we should deprecate it if that's really what
> we want... Maybe the clients could be patched to stop advertising raw PCM
> support? I don't know if no audio at all is more acceptable than not doing
> audio well in some cases.

As a user, being given the information and the option to disable is the 
best case.  A message saying "No compressed audio codec is available.  
Continuing with audio enabled may degrade performance.  Disable audio 
for this sesison?"

This would inform, and allow a user on a LAN to proceed or not, and give 
them enough info to get a head start googling for the problem.  A debian 
user still could install the necessary libraries his/her self and get 
the desired performance, given the information in the popup.

Silently using PCM would suck.  Silently disabling audio would suck. IMHO.

-- 
Thanks,
David Mansfield
Cobite INC.