Fixes a number of playback stuttering and general UI lag issues by setting all
background tasks to IdlePriority rather than LowPriority. While it was assumed
LowPriority tasks would always get scheduled below NormalPriority (e.g. main
thread) tasks, it turns out this is not always the case. If the background tasks
start consuming a lot of CPU cycles, the scheduler may use "dynamic scheduling"
to schedule them above the main thread regardless leading to UI lag. This is
apparently the case for all thread priorities apart from IdlePriority, which
is allegedly a special case where threads are *only* scheduled when other
threads aren't busy ensuring the main thread stays responsive.
Implementation isn't perfect yet, viewer/renderer doesn't update yet when
the preference is changed so a sequence needs to be re-opened for the change to
take effect.
Previously the audio output manager was a "hybrid device" that acted as a pull
device for audio devices and as a push device and device proxy for the rest of
the application. This approach turned out to be flawed, particularly in the
frequent opening and closing of the audio device (extremely slow). Since we
use both pulling (for constant playback) and pushing (audio scrubbing, short
bursts of sound), it needed a similar but different approach. This approach
will switch the output device from push mode (default) to pull mode (during
playback) only when necessary resulting in far less UI lag (basically
unnoticeable now) than the previous approach.
itsmattkc