Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

You are doing great......just way too many NOKIA apologizers on this board

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I am not apologizing for Nokia in the slightest. What I am suggesting is that people stop creating the same whining Goddamn threads over and friggin over again and take some responsibility for yourselves. You bought the device obviously right out of the gate. You could have waited several weeks and seen what shook out, but you didn't you wanted your toy NOW NOW NOW and you are paying the price for being a first adopter.

So either suck it up and try make the device better through contributing bug reports/brainstorms, sell it and GTFO and stop polluting the boards with pointless threads or keep the device and just STFU and stop polluting the boards with pointless threads

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

But you don't seem to understand, that there is no way that they CAN with this development model, as so much of the system is developed outside of their own internal processes.

To further expound,

PulseAudio is always running on the system, and it is routing audio to and from the various ports on the system, be it the headphone port, audio through bluetooth, etc.

Due to the architecture of the underlying sound drivers (which are written in ALSA), switching between headphones, to speakers, to bluetooth etc would possibly require changes in the output format of the sound, which requires reinitialization of buffers, etc... This is very messy, programmatically....

so instead, PulseAudio controls all audio ports and dynamically mixes everything down to the appropriate targets in real time. This takes CPU time...

Further CPU time is also taken by the codecs and sinks that make up the gstreamer pipeline. Due to architectural constraints in gstreamer, there are many of these conversions (some of them are heavily duplicated) many times a second...this can be made more efficient...this is clerical work that must be done alongside architectural refinement (not an easy task, but not insurmountable either)...

couple this with the fact that there are many processes running at different times (the tracker indexer is a good example of I/O suckage that happens at odd times), and that accesses to hardware drivers often pre-empt the kernel (the kernel in maemo is preemptive, this means that accesses to hardware have the capability to temporarily pre-empt, that is, suspend, kernel code so that they can quickly access the hardware, this can temporarily suspend the scheduler for short periods of time so that processes aren't running...), you have situations where a lot of things need to be optimized...

...this will happen...but it will take those of us who are willing to help out to make it happen...not just for coding, but for reporting bugs, etc...

things that will help this situation:

(1) make pulseaudio be nicer on hardware device accesses
(2) make other processes be nicer on the CPU (particularly in minimizing the I/O access, so that iowait can be brought to a minimum.. I/O in embedded devices is a premium resource which must be carefully rationed)
(3) optimized CODECs...while some of the shipped codecs use DSP calls to the OMAP's TI DSP, some don't, and these need to be rewritten to do so. If you install a community compiled gstreamer plugin, there is a chance it will not use the DSP.
(4) make gstreamer as a whole more efficient when doing things like memory copies (critical for moving data between sinks), and minimize the number of conversions needed between sinks.

those are just a few examples,
again, don't worry, it will get there...just understand that quite a bit of these improvements won't come from Nokia, but from the open source community at large.

-Thom

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

You have a bad attitude.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

in THAT case, i think u had a cooling off period??? or distant-selling regulation if u bought online??
I had 7 days to return my phone and cancel my contract if i didnt like it.. Im still in the 7-day period at the moment....

BUT the nexus one is not in the UK yet, and I dont want to order it from us because of phone insurance issues.. and the HD2 is too big for me... so i'd rather stay with the N900 and probably sell it later on if some issues dont get sorted...

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Thom, thanks for those explanations. Do you know if, as new versions of PulseAudio are released, we can update to them via the App Manager or do we have to wait for a new firmware release?

Anyway, I'm not sure if PulseAudio should be blamed for the sluggishness of the system when using the Media Player, since in my experience it is the mediaplayer process itself that sometimes takes over most of the CPU. PulseAudio rarely seems to go over 20%, and other media players don't seem to have as much of an impact either (not that I have used them as often as the default one).

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Seriously? Have you looked at Guber99? I mean really LOOKED????

Hit the search, put in Guber99's name in the username box and show "threads started by user".. go on.

SIX

Count them...

SIX

God damned threads that say the exact same thing under the guise of a different title.

And THAT'S IT!

NOTHING ELSE... NADA ZIP ZILCH NOTHING!!!!

SIX

I hereby declare my support for Bratag's bad attitude.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

So ignore him. It's not an excuse for a bad attitude.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

In General? No.. with regards to a specific person?.. yes.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Due to the low level placement of the code, we may only see improvements to pulseaudio initially via firmware updates... I can't answer that....

As for the other part of your reply, it's not just CPU. Pay close attention to iowait (%wa) in top. It's not just CPU time being wasted, it's also the amount of time the CPU has to wait for I/O to complete, these two critical pieces of information can tell us a lot about where the bottlenecks are and how to fix them.

-Thom