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

[Colin Guthrie]

Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-02-02 10:03:36 -0700, Richi Plana <richip at richip.dhs.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, 2008-02-02 at 17:38 +0100, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2008-02-02 13:01:34 +0000, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
>>>> Rémi Cardona wrote:
>>>>> 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.
>>> [...]
>>>> 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.
>>> Where's the actual pro for Skype?  I'm somewhat happy with Ekiga...
>>> Though it doesn't have direct support for PA, ALSA default works and
>>> placing pulse redirection into asound.conf does the trick.
>> Personally, in my case, 1) ratio of acquaintances on Skype as opposed to
>> some Ekiga-supported network/protocol, and 2) (here, I have to be
> 
> Ekiga is a SIP/H.323 client. So only standardized, interoperable
> network protocols, opposed to the proprietary stuff Skype does...
> 
>> Other than the fact that it's a closed-source app, there are actually a
>> ton of reasons to use it. And I haven't looked at Ekiga's source code
>> recently so in my case, it boils down to how well they're supported by
>> people other than myself ... and they (Skype people) seem to be doing a
>> good job recently.
> 
> They started with a completely wrong approach IMHO.  And Ekiga (or any
> other SIP client) is as easy to install, has voice and video support
> and is interoperable, in contrast to Skype.

In terms of politics, I agree with you Jan-Benedict, but in terms of
practicality (e.g. speaking to my mum or friends overseas etc.), Skype
wins hands down. I wish it wasn't so but such is life.

Anyway, this is off topic for this list. Hopefully someone can pass this
design approach back to Skype people so they act on it and some
enterprising person from the community will no doubt create a kick ass
plugin.

If they could just find a suitably licensed audio library (like libao
but LGPL or BSD licensed) then this would have made more sense from the
beginning but hey ho. That said, they are using QT4 so AFAIK, there is
some sound abstraction in there now.... not looked properly tho'.

Col