[drewfish]

I think it was their thread/process scheduler. It had a section of priorities which got hard realtime scheduling, then lower priority stuff got more "traditional" scheduling. (Alas, I don't know too much about thread/process scheduling so the details elude me.) That way the playback threads (and also other UI threads such as the window system) got the timeslices they needed.

[rasz]

Isnt giving near real time priority scheduling to audio/video how Windows handles things those days? I think I read that somewhere last week under Linux kernel scheduler behaviour response discussion.