I would like CELT integrated or plugged into Sun Audio player/recorder and
the AU format.  CELT is better than proprietary MP3 and a considerable
innovation.  Opus consists of CELT, Microsoft (Skype) SILK, and SILK + CELT
hybrid.  SILK is designed for a congested Internet causing Realtime Audio
packet loss, which is irrelevant to non-Skypers.  Safely ignore the hybrid
mode support and SILK.  OPUS CELT is the current improved version and
sufficient for Realtime Audio play and record.  I used Opus alot on FreeBSD
to record better-than-CD-quality audio.  CELT is the best open source audio
codec available.

In illumos I have only tested using the AudioHD device driver and the Sun
Audio player of the sample PCM AU files.  Sounds great on my desktop PC.  I
don't know what sound system is being used underneath.  All the obsolete
telecom codecs supported by Sun AU should be removed, leaving only fast
paths for PCM and CELT handling.

Another needed innovation is Dirac video codec accelerated by the GPU.
Dirac got a bad rap from a college kid writing a Signal/Noise Ratio
critique to graduate, and a publish-or-perish person trying to move up.
Its reputation was sabatoged before it got off the ground because it
competes with proprietary MPEG4.  Dirac is the best open source video codec
available.  Some specialized tweaks can make it even better.  It is still
available from GStreamer despite its corporate abandonment.

Heirloom Toolchest at SourceForge modernized Sun tools and Caldera tools
under the CDDL.  Heirloom replaces many of the CLOSED BINS such as pax, od,
sed, tail, tr.  Its troff tool produces excellent PDF with micro-typography
taken from TeX.  Heirloom Unix commands can be used without interfering
with existing Unix commands (or GNU tools).  All the Heirloom Tools were
upgraded to use UTF-8 and can be extended to use Big Endian UTF-32.  This
changes the fundamental unit of Information Technology.  It potentially
affects the design of Text Devices, and any program event loop.  System
software and User software will be affected by it.

Ideally, the Real Audio and Real Video and Real Text formats should be
upgraded with these three innovations to multimedia along with JPEG2000
Real Image.  Real Time Streaming Protocol using these formats is still
available from GStreamer despite widespread abandonment of the proprietary
Real Networks codecs in favor of MPEG4 and MP3.  It is the proprietary Real
container format that is still useful.  Their Helix project opens it to
future innovation.  Here it is.

-- John

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 9:06 AM, Garrett D'Amore <[email protected]> wrote:

> Btw it would be possible to revert the timer driven audio and go back to
> using the device audio interrupts for some or all of the audio devices with
> only a modest amount of effort. It is also possible (likely) that just a
> little bit of adjustment to the audio tunables can be used to eliminate
> glitches. (There is a balance between latency and glitch-free audio - more
> buffering increases latency but may clear up any glitches. I selected
> values that I thought would give the best glitch-free audio with minimum
> latency but it is possible that in heavier workloads more buffering is
> needed.)
>
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 6:56 AM Garrett D'Amore <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Boomer isnt OSS and it isnt pulse.  I havent worked on it in ages but
>> then I sort of assumed nobody was actually doing interesting things with
>> audio on illumos or Solaris.
>>
>> I partly suspect that some of the systems fare poorly with the timer
>> driven audio instead of using the on-chip isochronous interrupts.  The
>> timer driven stuff was an innovation intended to facilitate moving audio
>> streams between different devices (especially SunRay stream mobility) and
>> also to make writing audio device drivers simpler. (No custom device
>> interrupt handling needed.)  I know that this approach screwed up VMware as
>> their audio emulation actually depends on "using" the interrupts and cannot
>> run freely without them. I thought I fixed that.
>>
>> If folks have other audio issues I can perhaps try to look at it but I
>> would need solid problem reports and ideally access to some of the audio
>> devices that are affected. (I know USB audio support is a mess but that was
>> always the case even before boomer.)
>>
>> The current state of illumos audio may not be perfect but it is far
>> better than pre boomer days.  (Recall that pre boomer the stack was dev
>> audio based and worked with few open source apps.  It was a Sun specific
>> streams api.  Boomer still supports that legacy api btw but also supports
>> OSS apis.)
>>
>>   - Garrett
>>

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