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

[Eric Anholt]

On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 12:59 +0200, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> 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.

I'm completely linux at this point, and when I find the need to run
non-packaged swfdec I still enable pulseaudio, but I'm not actively
working on swfdec so I'm usually on the ALSA backend.

> That said, I can think of 3 ways forward:
> 1) Use Swfdec's Pulse output and make it work.

This is the plan I like, even though Lennart hates the API he created
(and justifiably so, in my experience).  If I cared about audio, I would
be submitting patches to just fix the ridiculous PA API mistakes so
normal people could use it and not wait for his mythical libsydney that
probably won't fix the problems.

> 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.

Yeah, 2) doesn't mean "create an ALSA kernel interface on your OS", it
means "port the ALSA library to your OS's sound infrastructure."  Likely
meaning the ALSA PA backend.

> 3) Revive the OSS backend.

Ugh.  Agreed with Benjamin here that this is the worst option.
Especially if you're building a desktop system and your sound should be
going through PA in the end anyway, which means using padsp for the
massive loss.

-- 
Eric Anholt
eric at anholt.net                         eric.anholt at intel.com


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