[vlc-devel] PortAudio removal or update

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

	Hello,

The PortAudio audio output plug-in has serious problems. Not only is it still 
using the old packet API, but it has a clock resolution of 1 second. Yeah. 
Seriously. No kidding. This is ridiculous. It is impossible for VLC to keep 
reasonable synchronization with such low precision. Instead of resampling it 
mostly will discard samples or insert silences.
Oh and it contains HUGE ifdefs due to bugs in the Win32 backends of PortAudio.

Ok, so maybe VLC uses PortAudio badly. And maybe the Win32 backends have been 
fixed, though I doubt it. But as it is, this plugin is basically useless. For 
the reference, VLC already supports directly these PortAudio backends:

ALSA
CoreAudio
DirectSound	
JACK
OSS
WaveOut ("wmme")

Then it has the following other backends:

* Linux HPI (asihpi): requires an out-of-tree kernel module
* ASIO (asio): not GPL compatible, not in contribs
* WASAPI: requires Microsoft headers from Vista, not in contribs
* WDM-KS: Windows kernel streaming, not in contribs

So... unless someone volunteers to fix it (and actually does fix it, which I 
suspect is not possible), I will remove it in version 2.1.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis