This will allow us to disable mixeng when we use a decent backend.
Disabling mixeng have a few advantages:
* we no longer convert the audio output from one format to another, when
the underlying audio system would just convert it to a third format.
We no longer convert, only the underlying system, when needed.
* the underlying system probably has better resampling and sample format
converting methods anyway...
* we may support formats that the mixeng currently does not support (S24
or float samples, more than two channels)
* when using an audio server (like pulseaudio) different sound card
outputs will show up as separate streams, even if we use only one
backend
Disadvantages:
* audio capturing no longer works (wavcapture, and vnc audio extension)
* some backends only support a single playback stream or very picky
about the audio format. In this case we can't disable mixeng.
Originally thw two main use cases of the disabled option was: using
unsupported audio formats (5.1 and 7.1 audio) and having different
pulseaudio streams per audio frontend. Since we can have multiple
-audiodevs, the latter is not that important, so currently you only need
this option if you want to use 5.1 or 7.1 audio (implemented in a later
patch), otherwise it's probably better to stick to the old and tried
mixeng, since it's less picky about the backends.
The ideal solution would be to port as much as possible to gstreamer,
but this is currently out of scope:
https://wiki.qemu.org/Internships/ProjectIdeas/AudioGStreamer
Signed-off-by: Kővágó, Zoltán <DirtY.iCE.hu@gmail.com>
Message-id: 5765186a7aadd51a72bc7d3e804307f0ee8a34ce.1570996490.git.DirtY.iCE.hu@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>
8efac073a5