The main thread in the WebContent process is often busy with layout and
running JavaScript. This can cause audio to sound jittery and crack. To
avoid this behavior, we now drive audio on a secondary thread.
Note: Browser on Serenity uses AudioServer, the connection for which is
already handled on a secondary thread within LibAudio. So this only
applies to Lagom.
Rather than using LibThreading, our hands are tied to QThread for now.
Internally, the Qt media objects use a QTimer, which is forbidden from
running on a thread that is not a QThread (the debug console is spammed
with messages pointing this out). Ideally, in the future AudioServer
will be able to run for non-Serenity platforms, and most of this can be
aligned with the Serenity implementation.
This creates (and installs upon WebContent startup) a platform plugin to
play audio data.
On Serenity, we use AudioServer to play audio over IPC. Unfortunately,
AudioServer is currently coupled with Serenity's audio devices, and thus
cannot be used in Ladybird on Lagom. Instead, we use a Qt audio device
to play the audio, which requires the Qt multimedia package.
While we use Qt to play the audio, note that we can still use LibAudio
to decode the audio data and retrieve samples - we simply send Qt the
raw PCM signals.
