[Theora-dev] player_example vs splayer

[Ralph Giles]

Speaking of portability and people more familiar with SDL:

The reason we have two example players for theora is that monty wrote 
the original example around the OSS audio interface used on several free 
unix-like operating systems, which immediately excludes win32 and MacOS, 
even though it used SDL to display the frames. SDL also has audio 
support, and is quite widely ported.

splayer replaces the OSS audio interface with the PortAudio(.com) 
library, which aims to be crossplatform, and somewhat uniquely offers 
latency reporting which greatly simplifies sync calculations. 
Unfortunately portaudio isn't widely installed, is big, and isn't being 
maintained very actively. So it's not may favorite dependency, and adds 
quite a bit to sdk sizes without making the splayer source any more 
familiar to developers.

Does anyone know why monty's audio sync hack for OSS wouldn't work 
(about) as well with SDL audio buffers? I guess there might be more 
latency overall, but the library is designed for game use so playback 
trigger should be responsive; it's just about tracking the audio clock. 

Can we switch player_example to just use SDL?

 -r