Hello. While searching the mailing list I found another person than me having problems with playback on a DMX 6fire card. I assume that this problem with the 6fire card should be present with every envy24 card in professional mode, so I have used this general subject. So here is a small symptom description with my theory about it. When starting alsaplayer without any parameters an (error-) log appears (see log1.txt)
>From the error messages we can see that alsaplayer tries two times to setup playback and fails both times on set_periods, one time with value 13 and one time with value 7. But when I start alsaplayer with the "-g 6" option playback works and a different log output is present (see log2.txt) So, alsaplayer still fails with set_periods to value 13 for a reason that I do not know, because I have forced alsaplayer to use the value 6. It appears that the "[" and "]" means that the borders are inclusive and that "(" and ")" means that the borders are exclusive. Although 13 and 7 are exclusive alsaplayer tries to use these values. Maybe this is a bug in alsaplayer. To my surprise, in professional mode the 1712 chip is only capable of playback of all 10 output channels at once with each using 32bit on the bus regardless of the number of channels and sample bits of the source format. Since buffer_bytes_max is set to 256k we get: playback buffer 256k / (channels*byte_per_channel) 40 / period bytes set by alsaplayer 1024 = max. num of periods 6.4 So the maximum number of periods is 6! To conclude, I have two main concerns: 1. Alsaplayer should be able to set the num. of periods correctly to 6. Maybe I am wrong in this mailing list for mentioning this. 2. With the ice1712, 256k of buffer memory and assuming 44.1kSps only 0.13 seconds of playback can be stored in the driver buffer. I noticed a lot of xrun when doing background tasks while listening to music or when only watching a video. What can be done about this? - Implement a pre-buffer in kernel with the source bitrate and number of channels? - increase the kernel buffer. But then only for one second 1.8M of kernel ram are needed! This is my software setup: SuSE 8.2 alsaplayer 0.99.74 alsa 0.9.0.cvs20030217 (lib,...) I want to hear your opinions! Greetings, Eduard. PS: One funny thing is that using oss emulation the problem with the 0.13s buffer is still present, but oss setup works without glitches (e.g. xmms).
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/News/jpop> alsaplayer aiko\ -\ Chiisana\ marui\ koujitsu\ -\ 01\ -\ Orange\ na\ Mangetsu.mp3 --verbose AlsaPlayer 0.99.74 (C) 1999-2003 Andy Lo A Foe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> and others. Output plugin: ALSA output v1.9.0beta12 error on set_periods (13) Unavailable hw params: ACCESS: RW_INTERLEAVED FORMAT: S16_LE SUBFORMAT: STD SAMPLE_BITS: 16 FRAME_BITS: 32 CHANNELS: 2 RATE: 44100 PERIOD_TIME: (11609 11610) PERIOD_SIZE: 512 PERIOD_BYTES: 2048 PERIODS: [1 13) BUFFER_TIME: (11609 148595) BUFFER_SIZE: [512 6553] BUFFER_BYTES: [2048 26212] TICK_TIME: 10000 error on set_periods (7) Unavailable hw params: ACCESS: RW_INTERLEAVED FORMAT: S16_LE SUBFORMAT: STD SAMPLE_BITS: 16 FRAME_BITS: 32 CHANNELS: 2 RATE: 44100 PERIOD_TIME: (23219 23220) PERIOD_SIZE: 1024 PERIOD_BYTES: 4096 PERIODS: [1 7) BUFFER_TIME: (23219 148595) BUFFER_SIZE: [1024 6553] BUFFER_BYTES: [4096 26212] TICK_TIME: 10000 failed to configure output device...trying OSS error opening /dev/dsp Failed to register plugin: /usr/lib/alsaplayer/output/liboss_out.so failed to load output plugin (alsa). exitting...
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/News/jpop> alsaplayer -g 6 aiko\ -\ Chiisana\ marui\ koujitsu\ -\ 01\ -\ Orange\ na\ Mangetsu.mp3 --verbose AlsaPlayer 0.99.74 (C) 1999-2003 Andy Lo A Foe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> and others. Output plugin: ALSA output v1.9.0beta12 error on set_periods (13) Unavailable hw params: ACCESS: RW_INTERLEAVED FORMAT: S16_LE SUBFORMAT: STD SAMPLE_BITS: 16 FRAME_BITS: 32 CHANNELS: 2 RATE: 44100 PERIOD_TIME: (11609 11610) PERIOD_SIZE: 512 PERIOD_BYTES: 2048 PERIODS: [1 13) BUFFER_TIME: (11609 148595) BUFFER_SIZE: [512 6553] BUFFER_BYTES: [2048 26212] TICK_TIME: 10000 Loading reader plugin: File reader v1.1 Loading reader plugin: HTTP reader v1.2 Loading Input plugin: MikMod player v1.0 Loading Input plugin: WAV player v1.01 Loading Input plugin: MAD MPEG audio plugin v0.99 Loading Input plugin: Ogg Vorbis player v1.2 Loading Input plugin: flac player v1.1 Loading Input plugin: CDDA player v1.2 Loading Input plugin: libsndfile plugin v0.1 Loading Input plugin: Audio File Library player v0.2.1 Interface plugin: GTK+ interface v1.2