Wunschkonzert, Ponyhof und Abenteuerspielplatz

A quick update on Skype: the next Skype version will include native PulseAudio support. And not only that but they even tag their audio streams properly. This enables PulseAudio to do fancy stuff like automatically pausing your audio playback when you have a phone call. Good job!

In some ways they are now doing a better job with integration in to the modern audio landscape than some Free Software telephony applications!

Unfortunately they didn't fix the biggest bug though: it's still not Free Software!

posted at: 19:51 | path: /projects | permanent link to this entry | 8 comments

Posted by esnoeijs at Tue Sep 22 20:32:08 2009
That is absolutely awesome news :)

Posted by Rui Ferreira at Tue Sep 22 20:32:55 2009
I don't think that problem is fixable. Skype is peer 2 peer and they rely on the obfuscated protocol to prevent people using it in a way that it was not intended. Skype has most of its checks implemented in the client side. It is one of few protocols that never was reversed engineered and if someone does it probably they can make free calls and so on.

Posted by John McHugh at Tue Sep 22 20:50:25 2009
Empathy already supports this for audio/video calls and it also pauses playback when you receive a call. I also prefer xmpp over skype due to the federation.
Would be nice to have yahoo, aim, icq and msn switch over and take skype head on though.

Posted by Conrad Steenberg at Tue Sep 22 20:57:28 2009
Skype was the one application that I still had to use Mac OSX for. The skype-2.1.0.x beta works fine here on F11 :-)

Thanks Lennart!

Posted by Martin at Tue Sep 22 21:27:01 2009
Sounds great!

I really want to use Empathy for audio/video calls over XMPP but sadly, it has never worked in any way or form for me. Recently tried to get at least audio going again in whatever version of Empathy is in Jaunty. In fact, I tried more or less every possible FOSS client out there for various protocols and nothing bleeping works. So it was back to Skype. My only peeve with it (well, besides that it's closed and uses a p2p protocoll etc :) was that I had to kill PulseAudio. And now that is fixed. Woho!

Posted by Rob at Tue Sep 22 21:58:16 2009
Not sure what actually is the right tagging. Currently it is tagged "phone" one of the developer says.. stating this will be "fixed in the next version:

http://share.skype.com/sites/linux/2009/09/some_explanations.html#comments
(see 7th comment): "@egr-negr I guess you're using totem or some other video player that uses PulseAudio. In the beta version notifications streams have "phone" (higher priority) stream type, that's why the playback is being paused. This is fixed in the next internal version."

Posted by John Stowers at Tue Sep 22 22:09:50 2009
Perfect, well almost. This didn't fix the problem whereby my microphone is impossibly quiet and I have to scream to allow the person on the other end to hear[1] Oh well.

John

[1] I am one of the hundreds of people with an Intel HDA (ICH7, SigmaTel STAC9221) who is unable to turn their microphone up to a usable volume. Apparently it happens with ICH8 also.

Posted by Vudentz at Thu Sep 24 00:00:37 2009
Great, we will no longer receive complains about bluetooth headsets :D (I hope so :D)

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Tue, 22 Sep 2009

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