Well, if you'd like to test with a fellow openbsd user and play around
with some of the settings, feel free to hit me up.
ps - I'm loving smtpd... your efforts there are also greatly appreciated.
On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Gilles Chehade<gil...@openbsd.org> wrote:
> Wow, that's an interesting use of using aucat and ssh, you
> made me curious and i'm going to try it :-)
>
> Gilles
>
> On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 06:02:01PM -0400, Ryan Flannery wrote:
>> With the recent work done to the audio system on OpenBSD, a buddy of
>> mine and I figured it should be easy to setup two-way voice-chat
>> between two OpenBSD clients using nothing more than aucat(1) and
>> ssh(1). As we found out, it is both very easy and very usable! We
>> have telephone-quality chatting working with a <= 1 second delay in
>> the audio (after a few minutes of chatting, this is unnoticeable).
>>
>> First, a hearty thanks to Jacob Meuser and the other OpenBSD
>> developers who have worked hard on this recently. Your efforts are
>> both noticed and greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Second, I have a couple of questions...
>>
>> 1. We, the two users chatting (users neal and ryan) have ssh accounts
>> on each other's machines. To voice-chat with each other, what we did
>> boils down to the following:
>>
>> ryan# aucat -l
>> ryan# aucat -o - | ssh r...@neals-machine aucat -i -
>>
>> User neal would do the same, only to my (ryan's) machine.
>> When aucat is run in server-mode ('aucat -l') it creates a socket in
>> "/tmp/aucat-USERID/default" where USERID is the uid of the user who
>> ran the command (aucat -l). For another user (neal) to bind to this
>> socket, we had to make this socket available to the other user, namely
>>
>> ryan# grep ryan /etc/passwd
>> (find ryan's uid, call it RYANSID)
>> ryan# grep neal /etc/passwd
>> (find neal's uid, call it NEALSID)
>> ryan# aucat -l
>> ryan# cd /tmp/
>> ryan# chmod 755 aucat-RYANSID
>> ryan# ln -s aucat-RYANSID aucat-NEALSID
>>
>> Neal would do the same on his machine, only reversed.
>> Question: is it possible to run aucat(1) in such a way that the socket
>> it creates in 'global', such that other users can connect to it?
>> A quick perusing of the man/archives and the source says no... but I
>> may be missing something.
>>
>>
>> 2. After doing the above, we would both simply do the following...
>>
>> ryan# aucat -b 1 -r 11000 -o - | ssh r...@neals-machine aucat -b 1 -r 11000
-i -
>>
>> With the above -b and -r flags, the audio was not choppy at all, quite
>> high-quality (equal to telephone quality), and overall very nice. We
>> had about a ~1 second delay in the audio, however (neal's in Chicago,
>> I'm in Cincinnati... we expected this), but could any of the
>> developers familiar with the audio system see a way to perhaps
>> decrease this delay? We played with other rates (-r values), but
>> below 11000 the delay was about the same, and the audio became
>> "deeper" and more "muted". Any other options, to aucat or perhaps
>> audioctl, that one could play with to reduce this?
>>
>>
>> Many thanks to the devs again... this rocks. and it's in base.
>>
>> -ryan
