[LAU] Installing Google Voice Chat for Linux on Fedora instead of Debian

Niels Mayer nielsmayer at gmail.com
Thu Sep 9 21:04:06 UTC 2010


On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
> its called gstreamer-properties(1)

Yes, you can use gstreamer-properties (which incidentally has no
section 1 man-page :-) ) for some but not all of the needed
configurations, such as chataudiosink which is why i suggested the
command-line form earlier:

gconftool-2 --type string --set
/system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosink "alsasink"

>> To get this capability, you need to install the appropriate alsa
>> plugin for jack: alsa-plugins-jack; then use jackaudiosink instead of
>> alsasink, pulsesink, etc in your gstreamer config.
>
> the ALSA plugin for JACK has nothing to do with this. the
> jackaudiosink plugin for gstreamer talks directly to JACK.

Um... in my defense, they totally screwed up my son's schedule at
school, so i woke up at 5:30AM so he could be at his "period 0"
class.... I obviously shouldn't be posting before 8AM,  or at least
have a few more cups of coffee prior.

So I posted about http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=554457
which suggests installing gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad and then I somehow
skipped to using jack through ALSA. (???).

Perhaps behind the brainfart is this confusion/mess: Why are there so
many different mechanisms for talking to jack/pulseaudio, and so much
duplication. There's
(1)  a separate  way of talking to jack/pulseaudio as a PCM device
from ALSA. Why would you want to do it a different way, or at a
different level than a "virtual alsa device",  which you could then
specify as an alsaaudiosource/sink in gstreamer??

(2) There's the
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gst-plugins-bad-plugins/html/gst-plugins-bad-plugins-jackaudiosink.html
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gst-plugins-bad-plugins/html/gst-plugins-bad-plugins-jackaudiosrc.html
-- why are these "bad plugins?" and if they are, why would I want to
use them? What's the advantage of talking to jackd this way, versus #1
above.

(3) Just to make things more confusing, there's also Pulseaudio jack
plugin: http://tuxaudio.blogspot.com/2010/04/mint8-pulseaudio-and-jack.html
 ????

(4) My preferred method: phonon's priority list of devices and it's
non-lockup-if-device-busy behavior, and the ability to make jack, or
pulseaudio be one of those "devices" in the list, on a per activity.

Too bad's google's implementation is closed so we can't see what exact
code they're using, but from what i'm seeing, they've somehow managed
to get the worst-of-all-worlds behavior, by making a gnome app that
doesn't know about gstreamer and talks to ALSA and pulseaudio
directly. It doesn't pay attenption to settings like "chataudiosink",
unlike ekiga. (Incidentally, ekiga, doesn't get the "socket(): Address
family not supported by protocol" error on each connection. ") That's
why I infer that googletalkplugin doesn't use gstreamer, though it
should.

So if you wanted to use googletalkplugin with jack, you'd have to use
ALSA or pulseaudio with the pulseaudio jack plugin. Which might be why
I confabulated alsa-plugins-jack into my answer...

-- Niels
http://nielsmayer.com


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