[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: letter to distro mplayer packagers?

[Rich Felker]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2005 at 09:13:49PM +0100, Tobias Diedrich wrote:
> Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > vo=x11,
> [...]
> > The defaults MPlayer uses have been carefully chosen, there should be
> > no need to ship more than the default config file where all entries are
> > commented out. To further complicate matters there are multiple copies
> > of the example config file scattered over the packaging patch.
> 
> On that note, maybe it would be nice to reorder the default list for
> the audio codecs?
> ATM oss is tried before alsa and wrappers are tried after direct
> output drivers.

oss api is _preferred_, since it does not such like alsa does. alsa
should only be used if the user has stupidly omitted oss support from
their kernel, or if they insist on using alsa-specific features that
don't work through the compatibility layer.

> But for ease of use and desktop systems it might be preferable to
> try some wrappers first (e.g. jack, arts, polypaudio, don't know
> about esd (does it still only do nearest neighbour resampling?),

no, these all suck and have a/v sync issues that cannot be fully
resolved.

> what does gnome use?) and then alsa before oss (since oss is getting
> obsolete).  Also AFAIK the alsa driver still does not use the default
> device by default, but wants to open hw:0.0 which is of course nicer for
> MPlayer, but can be annoying if you expect mplayer to respect your
> dmix setup without extra configuration like most alsa apps do...

using dmix is highly discouraged. it will almost certainly harm
quality and/or a/v sync.

rich