[MPlayer-dev-eng] ALSA non-blocking mode

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 02:28:53PM +0100, Ingo Brückl wrote:
> Just curious: What is non-blocking mode and why is the device opened with
> regard to the "block" suboption of the alsa driver (ao_alsa.c, line 466)
> and set to blocking mode right afterwards (line 480)?

When people write useful commit messages, svn blame helps.
In r17620 the ALSA output was changed to always use blocking mode.
For some reason all the old cruft related to it was not removed though.
I guess it could be that there are ALSA devices/versions that cannot
work in blocking mode (which with the current code would just result
in a warning but possibly would not fail), but most likely nobody though
to or all were too lazy to clean up the code.
If you want feel free to throw away all the code related to non-blocking
and see what happens.