[gst-devel] ossaudio gstreamer plugin

[Clive Wright]

I have looked back into the archives and it appears that there is debate 
about whether or not ossaudio should even be supported.

I believe that oss development activity within the Linux kernel has 
stagnated (being limited to bug fixing) since Alan Cox took over from 
Hannu Savolainen as official maintainer in January 1999 with the result 
that most modern sound-cards are not supported.

I realise that there is support within Alsa for the majority of these 
sound-cards but most professional sound applications are still built for 
oss as evidenced by Alsa providing an oss emulation layer.

Since 1999 Hannu Savolainen has done a lot of work on sound drivers that 
use the oss api but for proprietary drivers licensable from 
www.4front-tech.com.

The source code for the majority of these drivers has recently been 
released under the GPL2 license.

The api for these drivers is now at oss version 4 which while retaining 
backward compatibility with the original oss api is significantly 
different particularly within the area of mixer control.
The result of this is an error message when attempting to control the 
sound-card's master volume using the Gnome volume applet or launching 
the gnome-volume-control:

"The volume control did not find any elements and/or devices to control. 
This means either that you don't have the right GStreamer plug-ins 
installed, or that you don't have a sound card configured".

I wondered whether the Gstreamer developers are aware of this situation 
and whether any work is being done either to incorporate the updated api 
within the gstreamer-ossmixer element or to produce a new plug-in 
specifically for this api.