Cameron Gutman
I was trying to use SDL_GetQueuedAudioSize() to ensure my audio latency didn't get too high while streaming data in from the network. If I get more than N frames of audio queued, I know that the network is giving me more data than I can play and I need to drop some to keep latency low.
This doesn't work well on WASAPI out of the box, due to the addition of GetPendingBytes() to the amount of queued data. As a terrible hack, I loop 100 times calling SDL_Delay(10) and SDL_GetQueuedAudioSize() before I ever call SDL_QueueAudio() to get a "baseline" amount that I then subtract from SDL_GetQueuedAudioSize() later. However, because this value isn't actually a constant, this hack can cause SDL_GetQueuedAudioSize() - baselineSize to be < 0. This means I have no accurate way of determining how much data is actually queued in SDL's audio buffer queue.
The SDL_GetQueuedAudioSize() documentation says: "This is the number of bytes that have been queued for playback with SDL_QueueAudio(), but have not yet been sent to the hardware." Yet, SDL_GetQueuedAudioSize() returns > 0 value when SDL_QueueAudio() has never been called.
Based on that documentation, I believe the current behavior contradicts the documented behavior of this function and should be changed in line with Boris's patch.
I understand that exposing the IAudioClient::GetCurrentPadding() value is useful, but a solution there needs to take into account what of that data is silence inserted by SDL and what is actual data queued by the user with SDL_QueueAudio(). Until that happens, I think the best approach is to remove the GetPendingBytes() call until SDL is able to keep track of queued data to make sense of it. This would make SDL_GetQueuedAudioSize() possible to use accurately with WASAPI.
This means that if you have two devices named "Soundblaster Pro" in your
machine, one will be reported as "Soundblaster Pro" and the other as
"Soundblaster Pro (2)".
This makes it so you can't into a position where one of your devices can't
be opened because another is sitting on the same name.
XAudio2 doesn't have capture support, so WASAPI was to replace it; the holdout
was WinRT, which still needed it as its primary audio target until the WASAPI
code code be made to work.
The support matrix now looks like:
WinXP: directsound by default, winmm as a fallback for buggy drivers.
Vista+: WASAPI (directsound and winmm as fallbacks for debugging).
WinRT: WASAPI
This tends to be a frequent spot where drivers hang, and the waits were
often unreliable in any case.
Instead, our audio thread now alerts the driver that we're done streaming audio
(which currently XAudio2 uses to alert the system not to warn about the
impending underflow) and then SDL_Delay()'s for a duration that's reasonable
to drain the DMA buffers before closing the device.
This tries to make SDL robust against device drivers that have hung up,
apps don't freeze in catastrophic (but not necessarily uncommon) conditions.
Now we detach the audio thread and let it clean up and don't care if it
never actually runs to completion.
James Zipperer
The problem I was seeing was that the the ALSA hotplug thread would call SDL_RemoveAudioDevice, but my application code was not seeing an SDL_AUDIODEVICEREMOVED event to go along with it. To fix it, I added some code into SDL_RemoveAudioDevice to call SDL_OpenedAudioDeviceDisconnected on the corresponding open audio device. There didn't appear to be a way to cross reference the handle that SDL_RemoveAudioDevice gets and the SDL_AudioDevice pointer that SDL_OpenedAudioDeviceDisconnected needs, so I ended up adding a void *handle field to struct SDL_AudioDevice so that I could do the cross reference.
Is there some other way beside adding a void *handle field to the struct to get the proper information for SDL_OpenedAudioDeviceDisconnected?
- It's now always called if device->hidden isn't NULL, even if OpenDevice()
failed halfway through. This lets implementation code not have to clean up
itself on every possible failure point; just return an error and SDL will
handle it for you.
- Implementations can assume this->hidden != NULL and not check for it.
- implementations don't have to set this->hidden = NULL when done, because
the caller is always about to free(this).
- Don't reset other fields that are in a block of memory about to be free()'d.
- Implementations all now free things like internal mix buffers last, after
closing devices and such, to guarantee they definitely aren't in use anymore
at the point of deallocation.
The internal function SDL_EGL_LoadLibrary() did not delete and remove a mostly
uninitialized data structure if loading the library first failed. A later try to
use EGL then skipped initialization and assumed it was previously successful
because the data structure now already existed. This led to at least one crash
in the internal function SDL_EGL_ChooseConfig() because a NULL pointer was
dereferenced to make a call to eglBindAPI().