Hi, even though I've been using Linux for about 2 years, I never really understood the multimedia aspects of the kernel architecture.

Can somebody just give me a quick blurb paralleling the sound and video servers of Linux to MS Windows? What's the difference between ALSA and OSS and the rest of the mess? Does the X Server take care of video requests? Is there a default directory for video/audio codecs? Any clues or links on the subject would be great.

yes, what a great idea to post this questions... i was wondering why is ARTS so bad (sound quality, using FC2) and OSS not... and why does OSS not play 2 sounds at the same time, for example when i'm hearing music with xmms and licq reports a new message... when the song ends, the commulate sounds of licq are played at the same time....


thankx


leg

I am not completely sure about the audio thing...

In general, however, things such as arts and esd are sound servers, or programs that take all sound output from other programs, mix them, and send them to the dsp device on your soundcard.

ALSA and OSS are not sound servers... they are methods that allow a program to write directly to the dsp chip (/dev/dsp) so when one program has /dev/dsp open another program cannot write to the file.

So probably one of the reasons why arts sounds worse than oss is because it has to do a lot of encoding/decoding to get everything in the correct bitrate so that the soundcard can understand.

hopefully, somebody who REALLY knows what they're talking about can add on to my explanation. As far as video, I have very little idea.