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Re: To pulse or not to pulse?



Am Donnerstag, 19. Juli 2012 schrieb Camaleón:
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2012 07:29:19 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> > On Wed, 2012-07-18 at 15:57 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
> >> aRts was ESD's counterpart in KDE, IIRC.
> >> 
> >> Anyway, we deserve the price to pay (PA can be complex to setup) for
> >> having a full-featured and advanced sound server with interesting
> >> capabilities regardless we use all of the features or not.
> > 
> > The sound server issue becomes more annoying with each day. Currently
> > it's hip to use Jack with DBus support, a PITA regarding to my needs.
> > I wonder how newbies should be able to handle all this stuff.
> 
> For my usual setups that's not a concern but basically because I don't
> make an advanced use of the sound facility other than watching flash
> videos in Youtube and playing multimedia content locally with Totem or
> Rhythmbox. Under this scenario PA causes me zero headaches.

For me it doesn´t. I only use

- Flash / HTML 5 (preferable) videos
- Amarok
- Dragon Player / Kaffeine with file or DVD playback
- USB sound card

with Phonon VLC.

With Pulseaudio I had all the aforementioned issues here in the thread 
like for example 1-2 seconds delay when pressing play on watching DVD 
between video and audio. Video starts and audio takes 1-2 second to start 
do and then is off sync. Thats on a dual core 2,5 GhZ Intel Sandybridge 
machine with rtkit installed.

Honestly I just though "WTF?" as that delay was completely gone after I 
removed Pulseaudio. And that was with some Pulseaudio 2 version already.

I am not on earth going to hand-tune this. Either this works out of the 
box for me, or Pulseaudio is gone from my machine. Its as easy as that for 
me right now.

Anyway, venting my anger with Pulseaudio here likely won´t help getting it 
changed. But from my experience at pulseaudio-discuss mailing list and 
reporting bugs I just got frustrated. Cause I got the impression that 
upstream is basically ignoring everything they do not like to see. They 
are perfectly entitled from doing that. And I am perfectly entitled not to 
use Pulseaudio, I have perfectly no obligation to do any hand-tuning at 
all to fix this on my own. Once I understood that I became more calm 
again.

Its still a pity IMHO since a good, cross desktop environment sound server 
could be a good thing. But IMHO then it needs to be a drop-in replacement.

It seems to work for you that way. Then by all means, use it. ;)

For me it didn´t.

The only specifics on *one* of the machines was a system-wide 
installation. That may be related to some of the problems, but otherwise I 
couldn´t have Amarok playback on one session while using another session 
at work. But granted thats unsupported. But then so thanks. It doesn´t 
work for my usage scenario and I may perfectly be done with it then. It 
was the machine with the latency issue between audio/video and in 
hindsight it might have had to do with the system-wide installation. But 
then IMHO I shouldn´t be required to do a system-wide installation in 
order to playback music on one KDE session while using another one for 
work.

But then thats an design feature. A user could record one other users 
music and that is an security issue. But then why not just provide a 
simple option like Network Manager does when I want to be able to setup a 
WLAN connection for several users. Too complex? Well then Pulseaudio is no 
drop-in replacement for me.

-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7


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