
Linux.FR has an
interview with Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd fame (among others). Regarding PulseAudio: "I can understand why people were upset, but quite frankly we didn't really have another option than to push it into the distributions when we did. While PulseAudio certainly wasn't bug-free when the distributions picked it up the majority of issues were actually not in PulseAudio itself but simply in the audio drivers. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling requires correct timing information supplied by the audio driver, and back then the drivers weren't really providing that. And that not because the drivers were really broken, but more because the hardware was, and the drivers just lacked the right set of work-arounds, quirks and fixes to compensate for it."
Member since:
2011-03-18
That's a fair point, I admit. Still, the most readily available source for 5.1 streams for most people would be DVDs, right? Is it still technically illegal to watch DVDs under anything other than Windows or OS X? (I'm asking; I just don't know. I've always preferred watching DVDs on a TV, so I've never messed with that.) Assuming it is legal under Linux, I'd have no problem with apt-get install dvdplayerapp pulling in PA as a dependency—my issue was just with Poettering basically saying "You are wrong" to people whose setups were clearly working for them.
And it makes perfect sense for them to do so, because what they need can't be supplied any other way. But they're not a normal desktop case.