On Thursday, 14 July 2016 19:32:51 UTC+12, Jet Villegas wrote: > A quick search for "ALSA vs. PulseAudio" comes up with mixed reviews for > either, which probably explains why we have both. It also seems like we can > count on ALSA being available on every distro, but perhaps not PulseAudio.
Most abstraction layers that we've tried to use have been more trouble than they are worth. GStreamer is one such example. However Pulse Audio has proven to be an exception in that it protects us from the idiosyncrasies of ALSA. I prefer to focus our efforts on Pulse Audio to make it better because it benefits more than just Firefox. Not only that, we get good support from Pulse Audio so it is one of the easiest backends to maintain. ALSA is on the problematic end of the maintenance scale. > Can we add some telemetry to measure that? We could use telemetry but I'm confident enough to think that it is worth changing the update ping to include the Pulse Audio version. We already include the kernel and GTK versions. Those numbers can inform our deployment plan. > Alternatively, you can wire this up so that we only fall back to ALSA > (stereo) when we can't get PCM audio to route through Pulse. We can do that for the WinMM backend for Windows XP because it doesn't have the same kind of maintenance burden. It doesn't make sense for ALSA. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
