Re: (tutorial) How to use PulseAudio on NetBSD

[Roy Bixler <rcbixler%nyx.net@localhost>]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 01:19:44PM -0700, Swift Griggs wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Nov 2015, Roy Bixler wrote:
> >I dislike pulseaudio for both architectural and performance reasons, so I
> >adopted the option outlined in the above pkgsrc-bugs link and it did allow
> >me to play audio in Firefox 41 without pulseaudio.
> 
> This discussion is a bit confusing. Firefox is able to play audio just fine
> on my NetBSD 7.0 box without me running pulseaudio. I'm speaking
> specifically of Flash doing the audio-playing. Since you already seem to
> know what a disappointing experience using Pulseaudio can be, I'm wondering
> why folks are fiddling with it at all? Why not just let Flash play via
> BSD/SUN audio? That works fine on my setup. Do you guys have some special
> requirements?

I think the problem is that recent default pkgsrc and binary
distributions of firefox use pulseaudio.  I'm really not sure why.  I
know it confused me because it used to work just fine without
pulseaudio.  I compiled a custom firefox with oss support so that I
could play HTML5 videos with audio and without pulseaudio.  For
comparison, I have an installation of the firefox38 binary package and
adobe-flash11 plugin and it doesn't seem to need pulseaudio.  I'm
happy with this as well.

> >Someone pointed me to Jack audio as a good alternative to Pulseaudio,
> 
> I'd run Esound (esd), Network Audio Server (NAS), JACK, or even aRts/Phonon
> before I stooped to running Pulseaudio.

Agreed.

> >I see that there is a pkgsrc package for Jack, so maybe I'll explore
> >integrating it into Firefox if I have time.  Or has someone already gotten
> >this to work?
> 
> Jack should work, but again, I'm wondering why you want that versus just
> letting it talk to /dev/audio ?
> 
> This might be of some interest to you:
> 
> http://jackaudio.org/faq/routing_flash.html

As long as the OSS option works, then there's no particular reason for
me.  I mainly hope that the firefox packagers would consider using
something other than pulseaudio as the default.

-- 
Roy Bixler <rcbixler%nyx.net@localhost>
"The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the
sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment."
-- Richard P. Feynman