Re: [Gumstix-users] gstreamer instead of alsa?

[Craig H. <cr...@gu...>]

On Feb 25, 2006, at 12:02 PM, Brad Midgley wrote:

> Is it worth investigating gstreamer on gumstix? It seems like it might
> be lighter than the alsa stuff. alsa could drop out of the picture by
> using oss emulation at the kernel level and gstreamer in userspace for
> audio codecs and apps...
>
> I've started writing plugins for alsa and then after getting stuck I
> started writing gstreamer stuff and so far it seems cleaner in  
> gstreamer.

For userspace stuff, I can't imagine that anything could possibly be  
worse than ALSA.  I've never seen such a complex mess with such a  
simple underlying issue.  However, the problem with using OSS at the  
kernel layer is that it's heavily deprecated (I have no idea why,  
given how much lighter-weight it is, and how much apparently simpler  
and easier to use it is).  The deprecation seems to be particularly  
deep with the PXA AC97 codebase; it wouldn't surprise me if within a  
point release or two the kernel maintainers pull a devfs on us and  
drop it entirely.

C