--softvol is enabled by default. For most audio outputs, this is a good
thing, as they have either their own (bad) soft volume implementation,
or control the system mixer. With ao_pulse, the situation is a bit
different: it supports per-application volume (i.e. volume control is
not really global). More importantly, ao_pulse uses a rather large audio
buffer, and changing the volume with mplayer's volume filter has a large
delay. With the native ao_pulse volume control, it's instant, because
PulseAudio's audio filtering happens at a later stage in its processing
pipeline (inaccessible for mplayer).
This means native volume control should really be allowed for ao_pulse,
while it's the reverse for other audio outputs. Make --softvol a choice
option, and add a new "auto" choice. This is default and will use PA's
volume control with ao_pulse, and mplayer's volume filter otherwise
(i.e. the old softvol behavior).
Make mixer support setting the mute attribute at audio driver level,
if one exists separately from volume. As of this commit, no libao2
driver exposes such an attribute yet; that will be added in later
commits.
Since the mute status can now be set externally, it's no longer
completely obvious when the player should automatically disable mute
when uninitializing an audio output. The implemented behavior is to
turn mute off at uninitialization if we turned it on and haven't
noticed it turn off (by external means) since.
The player tried to disable mute before exiting, so that if mute is
emulated by setting volume to 0 and the volume setting is a
system-global one, we don't leave it at 0. However, the logic doing
this at process exit was flawed, as volume settings are handled by
audio output instances and the audio output that set the mute state
may have been closed earlier. Trying to write reliably working logic
that restores volume at exit only would be tricky, so change the code
to always unmute an audio driver before closing it and restore mute
status if one is opened again later.
Restore the audio balance setting when the audio chain is
reinitialized (also after switching to another file).
Also add a note about the balance code being seriously buggy.
MPlayer volume control was originally implemented with the assumption
that it controls a system-wide volume setting which keeps its value
even if a process closes and reopens the audio device. However, this
is not actually true for --softvol mode or some audio output APIs that
only consider volume as a per-client setting for software mixing. This
could have annoying results, as the volume would be reset to a default
value if the AO was closed and reopened, for example whem moving to a
new file or crossing ordered chapter boundaries. Add code to set the
previous volume again after audio reinitialization if the current
audio chain is known to behave this way (softvol active or the AO
driver is known to not keep persistent volume externally).
This also avoids an inconsistency with the mute flag. The frontend
assumed the mute status is persistent across file changes, but it
could be similarly lost.
The audio drivers that are assumed to not keep persistent volume are:
coreaudio, dsound, esd, nas, openal, sdl. None of these changes have
been tested. I'm guessing that ESD and NAS do per-connection
non-persistent volume settings.
Partially based on code by wm4.
Current volume was always queried from the the audio output driver (or
filter in case of --softvol). The only case where it was stored on
mixer level was that when turning off mute, volume was set to the
value it had before mute was activated. Change the mixer code to
always store the current target volume internally. It still checks for
significant changes from external sources and resets the internal
value in that case.
The main functionality changes are:
Volume will now be kept separately from mute status. Increasing or
decreasing volume will now change it relative to the original value
before mute, even if mute is implemented by setting AO level volume to
0. Volume changes no longer automatically disable mute. The exception
is relative changes up (like the volume increase key in default
keybindings); that's the only case which still disables mute.
Keeping the value internally avoids problems with granularity of
possible volume values supported by AO. Increase/decrease keys could
work unsymmetrically, or when specifying a smaller than default
--volstep, even fail completely. In one case occurring in practice, if
the AO only supports changing volume in steps of about 2 and rounds
down the requested volume, then volume down key would decrease by 4
but volume up would increase by 2 (previous volume plus or minus the
default change of 3, rounded down to a multiple of 2). Now, the
internal value will keep full precision.
Make the outside interface of audio output handling similar to the
video output one. An AO object is first created, and then methods
called with ao_[methodname](ao, args...). However internally libao2/
still holds all data in globals, and trying to create multiple
simultaneous AO instances won't work.
