From kde-multimedia Mon Mar 03 13:52:16 2003 From: Stefan Westerfeld Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2003 13:52:16 +0000 To: kde-multimedia Subject: MAS in KDE X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-multimedia&m=104669966423967 Hi! As I had mentioned previously on this list, Tim Janik and me were in Copenhagen this weekend to discuss sound and interoperability issues with Leon Shiman, head of the MAS development team. To sum up the meeting, the following things can be said: (a) MAS itself (see also http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net) MAS is a media server developed with a lot of experience after an intensive design phase from developers with a lot of X and audio experience. It goes beyond a pure sound server but also does synchronization of different media types. As such it has the capability of providing timing for arbitary media streams on arbitary machines. Thus, not only sound streams but also midi and video streams can be synchronized. An important basic design feature MAS has is that it uses a peer-to-peer approach when it comes to getting multiple hosts synchronized. With one MAS server per host, all devices of all hosts are accessible from all hosts. It doesn't matter whether we're talking of windows hosts or unix hosts here. (b) aRts and MAS While MAS does things aRts doesn't (pervasive timing, peer-to-peer networking), aRts does things that MAS doesn't (managed audio routing, management of multiple clients, providing a rich high level API, midi). We have decided to cooperate more intensely in the future to - get the right things done in the right place (MAS should concentrate on what is necessary on the lowest level, whereas aRts should support MAS as the lowest level) - provide seamingless interoperability - share the experience of both projects (c) CSL and MAS As MAS currently does not provide a frontend library like CSL, something like this will be needed. We toyed with the idea to use CSL as a means of making those apps that do not need any special sound or media server functionality MAS-aware, as by making applications CSL-aware you can achieve a lot more than by simply making them MAS-aware, because they also will be able to use the other CSL backends. Thus whenever you write a driver for some free software application and have the choice between - adding MAS support - adding CSL support CSL support sounds more attractive, because by adding CSL support, you also get MAS support once you have a MAS driver in CSL, which also implies aRts and JACK and whatever-else support, once the drivers for CSL have been written. (d) KDE, Gnome, CSL and MAS To ensure interoperability between these (and further developments in the area), one strategy that looked very promising is to use CSL as common interoperbility standard between KDE and Gnome. This will not only instantly make KDE be able to use MAS and Gnome able to use MAS. The same would happen for any other sound / media server which could support CSL. In that way, the way of promoting sound server agnostic behaviour in desktop environments appeared to us as good solution. (e) Further discussion and further plans If financing can be ensured, we plan another meeting to get the CSL API and MAS API discussed and reviewed together, to then decide on the direction to work on. If not, that discussion needs to take place on IRC/Mailing Lists/... While we got quite some idea of strategical and organizational issues and the goals of what we want to do, the technical issues (like APIs, implementation details, source code quality issues, ...) still need to be sorted out, and thoroughly discussed / reviewed. We hope to thereby solve the interoperability discussed in the previous section within this month. Cu... Stefan -- -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan@space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *- _______________________________________________ kde-multimedia mailing list kde-multimedia@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-multimedia