[linux-audio-dev] Other real-time options

[Steve Fosdick]

On 08/04/05 21:54:30, Jean-Marc Valin quoted a conversation with Con
Kolivas:

> <con> aah record
> <con> that's not normal desktop usage
> <con> see what I'm getting at?
> <con> you're claiming it is required for ordinary audio playback
> <con> it is most definitely not required for ordinary audio playback

OK, so recording may not be something many ordinary users do and it
seems to be assumed by laptop hardware manufacters that if they do they
will only want telephone quality speech, hence the mic-in and no line-in
for the integrated sound hardware.

I do have an example though where lack of realtime priority causes
problems - listening to OGG Vorbis files with rythmbox, based on
gstreamer, on a 1.5Ghz Pentium desktop.  There's more than enough power
to decode vorbis but if I switch virtual desktops or anything else that
cauases a lot of window re-draw activity it caused audio dropouts.

For audio only this can be improved with buffering but this does not
seem to be popular with decoding engines that do video too, presumably
to make keeping things in-sync easier.