Audio - Video recommendations?

[Achaean]

Hi! :-)

I was testing the various audio-video subsystem options.
I kept here the onboard graphic and audio cards that came with my motherboard (some older versions of Nvidia and Realtek).
I don't really have any advance needs for multimedia playback. Everything is working properly, but I searched the various options just out of curiousity (and read a lot of documentation).

Xvideo seems slightly better (at this specific PC) than OpenGL and PulseAudio over ALSA and Phonon.
What is your recommandation-experience?
What do you suggest?
Xvideo or OpenGL?
PulseAudio or ALSA or Phonon?
Is there any real difference between them, or its just matter what your harware prefers?

[claydoh]

video is what works best for you (and I don't know enough on it)

Audio is a bit complicated as pulse, alsa, and phonon are separate things, but inter-related

To grossly oversimplify:
Alsa = kernel drivers - you need these for sound no matter what

pulse audio - manages the different devices you may have. It is not required, but makes things much easier these days

Phonon - Qt/KDE's abstraction layer enables you to control the output stream to be processed by different backends: gstreamer, Xine, and whatever Windows and MacOS use, as KDE is becoming cross-platform. It can roughly specify which device is preferred for specific events such as notifications going to the PC's speaker using its built-in audio chip, movie audio going to a connected TV via HDMI, and skype audio through a usb headset.

You do not need pulse or Phonon. Some people like to uninstall pulseaudio and have no problems. Phonon can basically be ignored

So again, to oversimplify, they are not different sound systems; after alsa, everything else is managing where alsa's output goes - device selection, volume controls and mixers.

[Achaean]

THANKS!!! :cool:
Then I'll leave them alone for now.