Rob Landley wrote:
> And a sound card with only 1mS of buffer in it is definitely not useable on
> windoze, the minimum buffer in the cheapest $12 PCI sound card I've seen is
> about 1/4 second (250ms). (Is this what you mean by "hardware fun"?) Even
> if the app was taking half that, it's still a > 100ms big gap where the OS
> leaves it hanging before you get a dropout. (Okay, some of that's watermark
> policy, not sending more data to the card until half the buffer is
> exhausted...) What sound output device DOESN'T have this much cache?
Imagine taking an input, doing dsp-type calculations on it, and sending it back
as output. Now...imagine doing it in realtime with the output being fed back to
a monitor speaker. Think about what would happen if the output of the monitor
speaker is 1/4 second behind the input at the mike. Now do you see the
problem? A few ms of delay might be okay. A few hundred ms definately is not.
> Now VIDEO is a slightly more interesting problem. (Or synchronizing audio
> and video by sending really tiny chunks of audio.) There's no hardware
> buffer there to cover our latency sins. Then again, dropping frames is
> considered normal in the video world, isn't it? :)
If I'm trying to watch a DVD on my computer, and assuming my CPU is powerful
enough to decode in realtime, then I want the DVD player to take
priority--dropping frames just because I'm starting up netscape is not
acceptable.
Chris
-- Chris Friesen | MailStop: 043/33/F10 Nortel Networks | work: (613) 765-0557 3500 Carling Avenue | fax: (613) 765-2986 Nepean, ON K2H 8E9 Canada | email: cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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