GNOME 40 Mutter Lands Wayland Presentation-Time Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME 40 Mutter Lands Wayland Presentation-Time Support

The patch series implementing support for Wayland's Presentation-Time protocol within the Mutter compositor has been merged ahead of this month's GNOME 40 release...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-40-Present-Time

[Brisse]

Looks like mpv already supports this. What about other video players like GNOME Videos (or should I say GStreamer?) and Kodi?

[uid313]

I am using Ubuntu 21.04 daily build, but unfortunately it does not and will not get GNOME 40, so it is still stuck with GNOME 3.38.

Previously I used X.Org but now I have a bug where I can't move windows by dragging the the titlebar so I had to switch to Wayland which does not suffer from this bug.

[andyprough]

So am I right in understanding that 13 years after the initial release of Wayland, Gnome is finally working on smooth frame by frame video and audio synchronization so that video playback doesn't get out of sync like one of those badly dubbed kung fu movies from the 70's?

Or maybe I'm wrong, haven't used Gnome in years and I don't have this problem with audio/video sync. I'm reading what I can on Wayland presentation-time, but the documentation I can find only ever seems to say that it is for smooth audio/visual synchronization and has something to do with correlating the timing of video with framebuffer flip.

[xnor]

Previously I used X.Org but now I have a bug where I can't move windows by dragging the the titlebar so I had to switch to Wayland which does not suffer from this bug.

2021, year of the Linux desktop!

[aufkrawall]

So am I right in understanding that 13 years after the initial release of Wayland, Gnome is finally working on smooth frame by frame video and audio synchronization so that video playback doesn't get out of sync like one of those badly dubbed kung fu movies from the 70's?

Presentation time support is not a strict necessity for smooth playback.

[Aryma]

we only need idle-inhibit and xdg-decoration for gnome to become proper DE

[uid313]

2021, year of the Linux desktop!

Year of the Linux desktop was 2013. Prior to that, I've tried out Linux, but back to Windows, kept tabs on Linux, but stayed on Windows then in 2013 I really started using Linux like full time for real.
Right now I got this bug because I am on the daily build, but other than that bug, and when I am running stable version not daily build, it is stable and works good.

[nranger]

So am I right in understanding that 13 years after the initial release of Wayland, Gnome is finally working on smooth frame by frame video and audio synchronization so that video playback doesn't get out of sync like one of those badly dubbed kung fu movies from the 70's?

Or maybe I'm wrong, haven't used Gnome in years and I don't have this problem with audio/video sync. I'm reading what I can on Wayland presentation-time, but the documentation I can find only ever seems to say that it is for smooth audio/visual synchronization and has something to do with correlating the timing of video with framebuffer flip.

I am a Gnome user and have used the Wayland session on and off since 3.20. A couple years ago I'd say Mutter was developed enough as a compositor that video playback and UI interaction felt smoother on Wayland than X11. And that feeling was born out in the graphs at vsynctester.com showing tighter frametime consistency on Wayland.

Where I always kept falling back to X11 was other feature issues -- clipboard sharing, server side decorations, and app support. Notably Steam, and the smplayer shell for mpv was kind of a pain on wayland with either blank video windows or a floating borderless window that didn't respond to keyboard shortcuts. The only performance issue I had with Wayland was OBS screen capture. Now that mpv has improved Wayland support, and Steam XWayland support is getting some love, it might be time to switch for good.

[oiaohm]

Really it all depends what the Year of the Linux desktop means to the person.

For me I have used Linux Desktops as my workstation computer since 1997.

Now Year of Linux desktop for governments and enterprise secure desktops that is a different thing. If you look at government requirements.

Following points have to happen
1) X11 not on bare metal this is in fact a must. Because the requirements for a secure desktop is functional lock screen that X11 on bare metal cannot do.
2) Pulseaudio/jack audio being replaced by pipewire is also a must because of security requirements. Pulseaudio was not designed to selectively and securely disable particular applications from audio capture and playback and is not design for real low latency either. Pipewire fix major Pulseaudio limitations that are required to tick off sections of government required security requirements for a secure desktop.
3) cgroups around applications so under Linux we have proper process management. http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blo...n-the-desktop/ covered here.
Yes items like cgroups around applications being able to block network access and so on will have to come.

With kde and gnome both moving to systemd desktop session management

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-inhibit.html

idle-inhibit in wayland protocol may be rendered completely not required.

Desktop session management has been like our old sound server problem were we have had every different wm and DE for X11 doing this differently with different levels of broken. Yes remember when DE use to come with their own unique sound servers on Linux.

The foundations to a proper secure desktop on Linux I will expect to be in place this year. With production versions appearing 2022/2023. This is when things will get interesting as its possible that the Linux secure desktop will end up raising the bar for what the requirements for the government secure desktop is above what OS X and Windows provides.