[alsa-devel] What does snd_pcm_delay() actually return?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 13.06.08 15:06, Jaroslav Kysela (perex at perex.cz) wrote:

> The comment for snd_pcm_delay() in alsa-lib is clear and it's what James 
> wrote. If only one app interprets this wrongly, then I agree it would be 
> better not to change original meaning.
> 
> Then we have snd_pcm_avail_update(). Although it is stated in comment that 
> this function is useless for non-mmap mode, it's quite clear that returns 
> number of available frames to be handled (r/w) by application.
> 
> The easiest method would be just to remove "useless for non-mmap" from 
> comments for snd_pcm_avail_update() and suggest to application developers:
> 
> 1) overall latency is returned by snd_pcm_delay()
> 2) ring buffer filling is controlled by snd_pcm_avail_update(), for 
>    non-mmap access is usage of this function optional
> 
> As mentioned, it will need to fix some drivers mixing software output FIFO 
> with ring buffer (USB, PCMCIA)..
> 
> Opinions?

Sounds good to me, on first sight.

Hmm, however, there is one thing I'd still need for PulseAudio:

I'd like to know when (in time units) the playback buffer would
underrun from now on if I don't write anything anymore. For the USB
driver at least this happens much earlier than just calculating
(buffer_size - snd_pcm_avail_update()) and transforming that into time
units, because the USB driver seems to remove a block at a time from
the playback buffer, and hence it will signal the XRUN much earlier
then the aforementioned value. To fix this I'd need to know what this
granularity is. If I knew that I could fix my sleep time accordingly.

In short: I need some kind of granularity information about
snd_pcm_avail_update() but I must admit that right now I am not
actually sure which parameter would be the best one to know about.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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