[vlc-devel] PortAudio removal or update

[Rafaël Carré]

Le 2012-01-30 13:51, Rémi Denis-Courmont a écrit :
> 	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.

Please remove it ASAP so NB testers who needed it (if they exist) can
report problems with other output plug-ins early