3D accelration control interface

3D accelration control interface

[Manuel Jander]

Hi,

I asked this before, but since nothing seems to happen by itself, i
decided to start designing a control interface for ALSA to handle
hardware assisted 3D positional audio.

Goals of the design:

* Provide a standart naming scheme to access 3D capable audio streams.

* Provide a very thin comunication layer for access to hardware specific
registers.

* Provide a well defined control interface (kcontrol or ioctl) to higher
level libraries like OpenAL.

* Provide 2 entry points: One for capabilities and data query and
another for scene rendering (set parameters of 3D stream). This should
be implemented not as system calls, but rather as kcontrol or ioctl
calls.


Anyone wanting to contribute is gladly welcome to do so.

Best Regards

Manuel Jander





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Re: 3D accelration control interface

[Justin Cormack]

On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 17:11, Manuel Jander wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I asked this before, but since nothing seems to happen by itself, i
> decided to start designing a control interface for ALSA to handle
> hardware assisted 3D positional audio.
> 
> Goals of the design:
> 
> * Provide a standart naming scheme to access 3D capable audio streams.
> 
> * Provide a very thin comunication layer for access to hardware specific
> registers.
> 
> * Provide a well defined control interface (kcontrol or ioctl) to higher
> level libraries like OpenAL.
> 
> * Provide 2 entry points: One for capabilities and data query and
> another for scene rendering (set parameters of 3D stream). This should
> be implemented not as system calls, but rather as kcontrol or ioctl
> calls.
> 
> 
> Anyone wanting to contribute is gladly welcome to do so.

Is there any hardware with enough documentation to write a driver?

Justin




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Re: 3D accelration control interface

[Manuel Jander]

Hi,

> Is there any hardware with enough documentation to write a driver?

I guess, yes. AFAIK the ESS maestro3 HRTF engine is documented. 
For the aureal Vortex soundcards, there is no documentation at all, but
i have just finished to tranlate the entire 3D interface code
(disassembling the windows driver and tranlating into C). There are
probably still bugs inside, but from my previous experience of
translating the hardware EQ support, i guess there are rather few.
At this point i have the information needed (and source code) to load
HRTF, atmospheric filter and Interaural Time Difference (ITD) parameters
into the hardware. I just have no way to link that together with
something useable (user space library).

The real matter is the design of "something" to glue together ALSA and
OpenAL. There may be other alternatives to OpenAL, but since its source
is open, its the seems to be the best candidate.

I guess there maybe some hardware vendor related people on this list.
They may be interested too.

Best Regards

Manuel




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Re: 3D accelration control interface

[Ville Syrjälä]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 06:25:39PM +0000, Justin Cormack wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 17:11, Manuel Jander wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I asked this before, but since nothing seems to happen by itself, i
> > decided to start designing a control interface for ALSA to handle
> > hardware assisted 3D positional audio.
> > 
> 
> Is there any hardware with enough documentation to write a driver?

I think openal already has a emu10k1 backend but it uses the OSS driver. I
don't have the the hardware so I don't know what it actually does.

-- 
Ville Syrjälä
syrjala@sci.fi
http://www.sci.fi/~syrjala/


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Re: 3D accelration control interface

[Manuel Jander]

Hi,

This is quote from the OpenAL devel list:

---------------------------------------/quote start
...
All the fancy features that come along for the ride with DirectSound 3D
under Windows -- such as HRTF -- will be there when using the DS3D
backend for OpenAL under Windows.  If the implementation has to fall
back to DS or MMSYSTEM, a simpler software engine is run which provides
pretty much the same capabilities as the Linux and MacOS versions of
OpenAL.  So it's true that the audio will sound different depending on
whose card you have with which drivers.

...

The software renderers do simple stereo panning -- that's true. 
Creative and NVIDIA would really like you to buy our hardware to do more
sophisticated rendering.  :-)

OpenAL is open source, so if someone wants to contribute more
sophisticated code to make the software path better, that's great.
...
--------------------------------------/end of quote

As you can see, there nothing being supported on linux, except some
software stereo panning. Thats what i want to be changed, and why i'm
into designing a ALSA-OpenAL interface for 3D (and may be other advanced
features) support.

Best Regards

On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 17:59, Ville Syrjälä wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 06:25:39PM +0000, Justin Cormack wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 17:11, Manuel Jander wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > I asked this before, but since nothing seems to happen by itself, i
> > > decided to start designing a control interface for ALSA to handle
> > > hardware assisted 3D positional audio.
> > > 
> > 
> > Is there any hardware with enough documentation to write a driver?
> 
> I think openal already has a emu10k1 backend but it uses the OSS driver. I
> don't have the the hardware so I don't know what it actually does.



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