Sound over X (was Re: X and sound on debian, really wanted!)
Hendrik Boom wrote:
Suddenly I see something I really *want*:
audio to go over an X connection from one machine to another! And
then it turns out just to be two separate topics.
A few months ago there was a slashdot discussion on this subject:
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/03/02/03/2137213.shtml?tid=141&tid=104&tid=152
I suspect that the topic of this article, MAS, will not be available until Debian
transitions to X.org. (Somebody pleace correct me if I'm wrong.)
The first thing I gleaned from the discussion is that sound over X is like perl,
not only that "TIMTOWTDI" (there is more than one way to do it) but they are all
mutually conflicting and no single way is very adequate (no offense, perl fans :-).
The second idea I got from the aricle and discussion, is that I don't want the
"Gnome way" to do sound over X, or the "KDE way." I want the "X way," and that is
what seems to be addressed by MAS.
The ultimate goal seems to be multimedia over X, but this raises "philosophical"
and architectural issues: X is designed to make the server local and the client
remote, which means the multimedia (recorded) data comes from the client and is
processed (i.e. converted back into sound and video) at the local X server.
On the one hand, pure network transparancy even for multimedia seems like the
Holy Grail of networking. On the other hand, serving the converted sound and
video data over the network reverses that concept and floods the network with
multimedia data. It would therefore appear to "break" the X architectural model.
How do any of these projects reconcile this with the "X philosphy?" Is that
philosophy obsolete?
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