PulseAudio 4.0 Brings Many Changes

[duby229]

No... Its using untested codepaths. If the alsa developers say "Here's function calls A through Z, you can run them in any order you want, all dependency-calls are handled in specific functions. If C needs A and B, you dont have to call A, B, then C, C will call A then B, then C will actually execute. Don't worry about it." And then an application like Pulse actually puts that to the test, and it finds out that its NOT the case, that you DO have to call A, B, then C..... who's at fault? The Alsa developers for coding one thing and saying another, or the Pulse devs for believing them?

When Pulse first came out in Ubuntu one of the big issues was that Pulse hit driver bugs because they were running portions of the audio drivers that no one had ever tried before. Those were BUGS in the -alsa- driver that had to be fixed. Who's to say that we fixed all the bugs? Maybe you guys ARE hitting bugs in the Alsa drivers and the reaction of "Well just dont run Pulse" is actually just a bandaid. If the bugs are in the alsa driver, you aren't actually fixing them. You're ignoring them.

Now, maybe they ARE in Pulse, in which case they should be fixed too-- but they need to be reported first. And instead of actually CARING about the software people are using, you guys are taking the easy, lazy, way out and giving up without even trying.

You can make up whatever crap you want to make up....

The simple fact is that Alsa works fine by itself, but PA results in multiple seconds of A/V delay. Its a fact. You can try to blame it on Alsa as much as you want, but Alsa is the one that works and PA is the one that doesnt.

Facts are facts whether you like them or not.

And you're right, I don't care one tiny little bit for PA. I would love to see it die. Which is more than it deserves.

[RahulSundaram]

I'm 100% certain that you are -HIGHLY- overrating how many people PA works for. You can claim that it works for millions of people, but the truth is far more likely to be that PA has detracted more users from linux than the number of people using it. And you can thank the dumbass major distro's for that.

I still havent found a single oob experience where PA works. Not one.

You are asserting that all major distributions including the enterprise variants are all dumb for chosing to use PulseAudio by defaultand you are correct? How likely do you think that is?

[duby229]

It's far more likely that every single major distro is dumb as hell for adopting PA than it is that millions of people are using PA.

[ShadowBane]

I'm 100% certain that you are -HIGHLY- overrating how many people PA works for. You can claim that it works for millions of people, but the truth is far more likely to be that PA has detracted more users from linux than the number of people using it. And you can thank the dumbass major distro's for that.

I still havent found a single oob experience where PA works. Not one.

I still haven't found a single oob experience where PA /doesn't/ work. Not One.

I stared using PA when it became default in Ubuntu.

[duby229]

PA is kinda like a reverse catch 22..... "If you want to detract millions of people from linux,then use PA, so we use PA."

You have to admit that's pretty retarded.

[ShadowBane]

You can make up whatever crap you want to make up....

The simple fact is that Alsa works fine by itself, but PA results in multiple seconds of A/V delay. Its a fact. You can try to blame it on Alsa as much as you want, but Alsa is the one that works and PA is the one that doesnt.

Facts are facts whether you like them or not.

And you're right, I don't care one tiny little bit for PA. I would love to see it die. Which is more than it deserves.

I can't tell the difference in latency between running application>jack>output (jack is at ~30ms latency), application>pulse>jack>output, and application>pulse>output in terms of latency on any system I use. Additionally, Pulse>Jack sounds much better for gstreamer based applications because gstreamer uses a terrible resampler by default if the jack sample rate doesn't match. Also, without Pulse I can't properly use my headphones, speakers, and the audio out over hdmi on my computer (which are all separate audio devices. Restarting applications to move them between devices is really not an option.

[duby229]

I still haven't found a single oob experience where PA /doesn't/ work. Not One.

I stared using PA when it became default in Ubuntu.

Let me give you some background. I'm not a programmer. I'm just simply not organized enough to be a good one. But I'm a damn good system administrator. A company I work for still uses some older windows applications on their workstations, so I set up a windows terminal server farm for them and replaced their workstations with thin client linux boxes. The thin clients boot up to a minimal linux desktop which runs from a read only liveusb that I maintain. The windows application is then served out to these thin clients and drawn in a window using RDP on the workstation These arent multimedia computers.

Needless to say that my experience with PA is somewhat limited on a professional level.

On a personal experience level trying to get it to work properly on my own computer has been nothing but bad.

[droste]

I still havent found a single oob experience where PA works. Not one.

It worked oob for me and it's the reason I'm not dualbooting anymore. I used to boot into windows to watch movies on my TV. Now _with PA_ I have a even better user experience than what I had on windows with the ability to move audio streams between different outputs and have different volume levels for them.

/edit:
By moving them I actually mean having a nice overview over what is running and drag and drop them onto a different output ;-)

[duby229]

When I try to output audio to my TV (through my receiver) there is multiple seconds of audio delay. It won't work. With VLC cpu usage for the PA process adds up to about 100% cpu load on one core. I'm pretty sure this is the cause for the delay. I have no idea what PA is doing with all those CPU cycles though.

[droste]

There seems to be an issue with some HDMI ALSA drivers where PA has absurdly high CPU and/or memory usage, maybe that's the problem? But I don't know if it's a PA or ALSA problem...
For me it's playing fine (no delays) and the cpu usage, with the 3 stream from the screenshot playing, is at ~0,5%, which is quite acceptable.