[Swfdec] Resurrect OSS support for non-ALSA operating systems

[Benjamin Otte]

Hey,

Here's the necessary knowledge about audio backend choice:
1) I don't want to maintain multiple backends, because identifying
bugs in backends I don't use is rather hard. So I try to find the best
one possible for me (I run Ubuntu) and make it work. That is currently
libalsa.
2) The long-term goal for Swfdec is to switch to Pulse, as it seems to
work anywhere. However, considering that Pulse has no good API to
write to currently[1], I've not yet looked at making the switch.
3) The current Pulse backend is written by Eric Anholt, and he uses it
on FreeBSD. He's not very actively hacking on it, so I guess it might
contain various bugs.

That said, I can think of 3 ways forward:
1) Use Swfdec's Pulse output and make it work.
2) Make ALSA work on BSD (probably without direct output through OSS
or Pulse or whatever). Not sure how hard that is, but it'd port you
lots of other apps, too.
3) Revive the OSS backend.

I personally would prefer option 1 or 2. 1, because it would prepare
our Pulse backend for the switch better. And 2, because it would solve
lots of BSD audio issues and make life easier for you guys. Option 3
is not that interesting for me as I think supporting OSS is like
flogging a dead horse.

Cheers,
Benjamin

1:http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/10/pulse-my-audio.html


On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 11:24 AM,
<chriswareham at chriswareham.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> riccardo.magliocchetti at gmail.com wrote:
>> chriswareham at chriswareham.demon.co.uk ha scritto:
>> > Hi,
>>
>> Hi Cris,
>>
>> > I have been trying to update NetBSD's swfdec and browser plugin packages to
>> > 0.8.0, but have been unable to get audio support working. Judging by the source
>> > repository, OSS support was removed from swfdec during the 0.7.x series with a
>> > comment that it was unmaintained. This means that with ALSA support the only
>> > working option, audio only works on Linux. If the OSS support was resurrected, I
>> > would be prepared to maintain it (for NetBSD at least). I would also contact the
>> > maintainer of OpenBSD's swfdec package to see if he's willing to help test on
>> > that platform.
>>
>> There's a pulseaudio backend available that will work on your platforms,
>> please give it a try. If you have issues with pulseaudio backend over oss
>> report them. Unfortunately that's not very popular. Then if you are still
>> sure to ressurect OSS please take a look at these for reference:
>>
>> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13772
>> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14875
>>
>> thanks,
>> riccardo
>>
>
> Hi Riccardo,
>
> Thanks for the bug references. I hadn't tried the Pulseaudio backend, as it
> appeared to be disabled in the 0.8.0 release. Pulseaudio itself does work on
> NetBSD, so I will try the current source of swfdec from the Git repository and
> see if I can get audio working.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
>
>
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