[pulseaudio-discuss] Help wanted for porting Skype to use PulseAudio

[Colin Guthrie]

Rémi Cardona wrote:
> Tanu Kaskinen a écrit :
>> Happened tonight on #pulseaudio:
>>
>> 00:41 < Q-FUNK> guys, it appears that Skype might be willing
>>                 to become good audiozens and stop accessing 
>>                 ALSA directly.  
>> 00:41 < Q-FUNK> however, they would need help to understand
>>                 what's required for stripping ALSA and OSS 
>>                 support out of Skype and replacing it with
>>                 native PulseAudio support.
> 
> My 2 Euro cents on this :
> 
> As Skype is a proprietary application, I think it'd be a good thing if 
> they did their PA support like Macromedia/Adobe did for flash, using 
> libflashsupport.
> 
> Cons :
> - it's a tiny additional amount of work ...
> 
> But, there are major Pros :
> - you can target other APIs/OS than PA (phonon, alsa, oss, ...) for 
> whatever reason (although I'm not advocating it)
> - _more_importantly_ should the PA API/ABI change, the community will be 
> able to update that library without the need for Skype to release a new 
> version
> 
> Like Macromedia, they could release the initial library with their 
> current alsa code, and let the "community" add PA support on its own, 
> working in an open and sustainable way.

Big +1 on this. Making it a community project would seriously help their
Linux users and as a result their reputation (Skype's) would increase.

I'd also be wary of removing Alsa support completely. Perhaps just
accessing alsa in a way that doesn't break the pulse alsa plugin would
be a good start, then they can work on adding a libflashsupport type
interface.

The problem that Skype has that Flash doesn't is support for multiple
devices so their extension plugin may have to be slightly cleverer in
that respect (although the pulse plugin would just have to have a
different stream name for ringing and call and you can leave it up to
pulse config to configure differetn devices etc.)

Col