[gst-devel] bluetooth audio plugins

[Brad Midgley]

Benjamin

> I've recently gotten a bluetooth headset and had wondered about using it
> on Linux and seeing how bluetooth headsets are handled in Linux left me
> extremely unimpressed. And that was architecturally, not the fact that it
> didn't work ;)

I'm glad you can see how messy and incomplete it is. What we have now is 
a prototype. We need to move the audio drivers out of the kernel with a 
decent alsa and/or gstreamer plugin.

The alsa plugin api has been changing... it was rewritten and I think 
they recently added an api for clients to discover alsa-lib plugins but 
no clients are using it yet.

> I had expected that when I connect a bluetooth headset to my computer it
> automatically creates a sound card device

Some of what you want needs to be hooked into the desktop bluetooth 
helper app(s)

> So a GStreamer-only solution, while probably easier to code, would have
> lots of apps unable to use the headset.

Ok, that sounds reasonable. I guess gstreamer could make use of an 
alsa-lib plugin indirectly, eh?

> PS: Are you bluetooth-alsa guys on IRC smewhere? I'd like some
> hand-holding while digging through the Bluetooth and kernel code - which
> is even less documented than ALSA, who'd have thought. At least the 1250
> pages Bluetooth core protocol docs are available ;)

Not really but it's a good idea. If there's a good place on irc to 
discuss alsa-lib plugin work you might see me there since I am 
struggling with this stage.

Brad