Re: [openvrml-develop] OpenAL sound support in OpenVRML

[Braden M. <br...@en...>]

On Tue, 2002-04-09 at 03:14, -oli- wrote:
> - I will use, develop and compile it under Windows (98 and 2k) with M$ 
> VisualC++ 6.0, and as I don't know much about makefiles, I will _not_ be 
> able to produce a patch which enables compiling with "--with-openal". I'm 
> inserting my own source with "#if use_openal" at the moment, so someone 
> else can adapt the makefiles.

Good; that will facilitate the configure option. Tom or I can help with
that when the time comes.

> At 20:43 08.04.2002 -0400, you wrote:
> >        * *Yes*, I would accept a patch for OpenAL-based audio support.
> >         * This support would be disabled by default. If someone wanted
> >           to build with it, they'd need to configure with
> >           "--with-openal" or somesuch.
> >         * If OpenVRML also had support for some other audio solution (I
> >           mentioned GStreamer before, and I still think it's our best
> >           bet under Linux), I would not be inclined to spend too much of
> >           *my own* energy maintaining multiple audio solutions in
> >           parallel.
> 
> That's okay.
> 
> >If you think I'm trying to steer you toward GStreamer instead of OpenAL,
> >you'd be right. However, I appreciate that you may have your own
> >motivation for wanting to use OpenAL, and I have no intention of
> >belaboring the issue beyond this posting. I appreciate that your work
> >*will* improve OpenVRML, even if it's not exactly what I'd do. :-)
> 
> I looked on the GStreamer website. It seems to be a powerful solution for 
> media processing, but there is no windows support (yet), so I cannot use it 
> at this time.

My thinking is that we'd use GStreamer on Linux, DirectX (or maybe
Quicktime) on Windows, and Quicktime on Mac. That probably sounds like
overkill for audio; and it would be, if we didn't have the MovieTexture
issue to solve as well. I think we'll need these dependencies *anyway*
for good MovieTexture support, and so it will be convenient to use their
facilities for streaming audio as well.

However, since your thesis is focused on audio, I can see how expanding
your work to a generalized streaming media solution would be a
distraction.

Best of luck to you, and I'll try to help however I can.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <br...@en...>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <br...@ja...>