[LAU] Media Players vs Xorg?

[hollunder at gmx.at]

On Sat, 01 Aug 2009 23:19:39 +0300
David Baron <d_baron at 012.net.il> wrote:

> I find that I must renice most any media player to at least -5 to get
> well- behaved play. I believe the problem is competition with X for
> resources (I am running a Debian Sid box with KDE4). Then, my and
> renicer daemon will set them back to 0 after I have been listening
> for a while.
> 
> Has anyone here had, solved this problem?
> Know how to make exceptions in and configuration?
> Would it work to run the players through jack rather than alsa and
> thereby get "real time".

I don't know of this problem but I run my mediaplayers through jack.
Theoretically all major ones support jack, mplayer and xine do it quite
well but VLCs implementation is severely broken and none of the devs
use it and they won't fix it (they still claim it's supported on their
website). I tried to contact the original authors of that piece of code
per mail but never got an answer.

For audio only there are a number of good options. Personally I like
mpd and aqualung but there certainly are more.

And yeah, with a sane jack setup audio should have priority about
pretty much everything else. Works fine for me.

Regards,
Philipp