[ltp] flash plugin (netscape/mozilla), alsa and snd-card-cs461x

[D. Sen]

Stephen Patterson wrote:
> On 13 Apr 02, D. Sen (dsen@ieee.org) wrote:
> 
>>Hi,
>>
>>I am using ALSA (0.5.12a driver, 0.5.10b libarary, 0.5.10 utilities) on 
>>my IBM Thinkpad T21 (using the snd-card-cs461x drivers). A problem 
>>occurs when I am runing an audio application (like xmms or realplayer) 
>>and concurrently try to open an URL with flash content on my web browser 
>>(either netscape or mozilla). The browser hangs requiring a kill and a 
>>restart.
>>
>>Has anyone else encountered this problem and know a work around for it? 
>>Will the ALSA development release solve the problem?
> 
> 
> I think the real problem here isn't in the ALSA or OSS drivers, but rather
> having 1 application (xmms, realplayer etc) holding the sound card open, and
> netscape (like most applications) waiting for the other process to
> relinquish the sound card. 

Yes, this seems logical. However, I dont get the "waiting" part. If I 
was writing an application I would "move on" after not being able to 
open the sound device. If I was writing a sound driver, I would let the 
requesting application know that sound driver was being used by another 
application.

I am pretty sure this is how the OSS driver behaved. When I was using 
xmms, realplayer and keeping the sound device busy, I wouldnt get any 
audio out of the flash content *BUT* the browsers didnt hang and I just 
got the visual flash content (not the audio content).

> You can get round this by using esd[1], a software
> mixer daemon which combines sound inputs from multiple applications into a
> single output stream, which is sent to the sound card.

Ahhh yes, esd. It works fine when all the audio streams are at the same 
sampling rate but when it tries to mix say an 8 kHz speech signal with a 
44.1 kHz music stream, the result is not always nice......besides taking 
up substantial CPU usage.

> 
> [1] ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/esound/
> 



-- 
D. Sen, PhD
http://www.auditorymodels.org/~dsen



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