FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 04.05.09 21:36, Kevin Kofler (kevin.kofler at chello.at) wrote:

> 
> Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > When used for surround sound the ALSA mixer knows channels such as
> > "Rear Front Left" and "Side Front Left". That is broken.
> 
> It may seem broken for you, and the interface is certainly suboptimal, but
> it's better than not being able to control the surround balance at all. For
> users, the current interface WORKS.

Only if in your vocabulary "works" means "I know all bugs and can work
around them". Otherwise surround mixing in ALSA does not qualify as
"works" I would say.

> > The fact that these controls are available is an implementation detail
> > which should be and is hidden by PA.
> 
> But until that works and is exposed in the relevant UIs, toggling the
> boolean switch WORKS.

That may work because you are lucky. Controlling digital out via the
manually fiddling with the direct mixer controls is not how things are
supposed to work in ALSA. You are supposed to use "iec958" as device
string when doing SPDIF. Doing it by directly controlling the mixer
like you can do on some cards always has been a dirty hack (an
uncessary one even!) and hence the fact that this is now hidden should
not be considered a regression in any way.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4