[MPlayer-dev-eng] audio_out.c question

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 01:44:20PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > Many people have music playing in the background constantly.  One should
> > not interfere with the other.
> 
> yes, iam definitly on the windows-ism side here too, multiple audio streams
> are usefull, also thikk about headphones, a speaker making a loud beep really
> defeats one of their proposes

Laptops route it to the headphones and allow you to control the
volumes. Oldschool soundcards like I use allow you to route the
pcspeaker line thru them too. I dunno about other hardware.

In any case its legitimate for some purposes to want multiple sound
sources to the output, but it should be supported by hardware, not
with ugly hacks that _cannot_ be done correctly in software (or which
require cpu-intensive code in kernelspace to handle correctly).

Rich

P.S. RE: kernelspace, it's impossible to do mixing in userspace
correctly due to timing issues.... unless you want to force users to
have a daemon running with realtime priority which is quite nasty and
just as bad as having it in kernelspace, and much harder to
synchronize and ensure correctness for.