[mythtv] No Start with Pulse Audio (Changeset 20310)

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi,

'Twas brillig, and Daniel Kristjansson at 24/04/09 15:33 did gyre and 
gimble:
> Heh, 4/13, my information is probably old then. D.T. Chen told me to try
> upstream about a week before that release...

Cool. I thought that may have been the case :)

>> PS, pulse switched to git a good while back now, so I presume your "svn 
>> version" is a generic term :)
> Yes :)
> 
> PS Found this looking back at D.T. Chen's e-mails:
> 
> << Kernels that don't contain Takashi's pcm core (pcm_lib) rework are 
>    particularly prone to this symptom. At least Fedora and Ubuntu have
>    merged  the necessary bits, and I suspect Mandriva and OpenSUSE
>    have as well. >>
> 
> I guess you can answer as to Mandrake? Do you know if this rework has
> been backported to any previous releases that included pulse audio?

Yeah, we've got a few upstream alsa fixes in our kernel, but had to back 
out some of the timing related changes for the newer glitch-free mode 
(more a name based on the principle behind the architecture - it 
ironically does cause glitches for several people!!). I'll be honest and 
say that although I'm the pulse maintainer in Mandriva, I didn't really 
have much hand in the kernel patches, so I'm not 100% sure!

There are no plans as far as I'm aware to backport any kernel level 
features to the previous releases (we've had pulse by default for the 
last two), but our latest release is out in the next day or so, so 
people have a good upgrade path!

I didn't get much time to test properly, but when I built 0.21-fixes 
before our freeze (and before the pulse patch went in) it seems to work 
pretty flawlessly going through alsa. It did print a bunch of underrun 
warnings on the console, but it did sound fine and seemed to sync up OK. 
Didn't get too much change to see properly tho'. I'll be upgrading my 
various boxes around the house soonish and will try to do a bit more 
thorough fiddling!

> But then I was using an Ubuntu kernel, and others have reported this
> with both recent Fedora and Ubuntu kernels, so it's probably another
> Red Herring.

Audio is in a bit of flux just now with red herrings a plenty, but it's 
quite exciting too and loads of good progress is being made. I'm trying 
to work on the GUI side a bit and feeling that the sound stack on Linux 
is going to be pretty damn rocking in the next six months to a year or so :)

Cheers just now.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
myth(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
   Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
   Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
   PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
   Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]