I'm new to Alsa and its concepts, so I'd like to ask if the following assumptions are correct.
A short explanation on the background: I'm currently examining different Voice over IP softphones on Linux. Every program that I've seen so far has the same limitation: it works with OSS. I guess you all know the drawbacks: I have to decide whether I want to have the softphone running, so that I can be called, or if I want to listen to some MP3s without being reachable by VoIP. Yes, I know of libaoss, but this causes some new problems.
As we have a very flexible sound system available for Linux, it would be nice if there also was a softphone that makes use of this. Here is my idea:
One of the tasks the softphone has is to record the voice of the local caller and encode with one of several standard codecs (such as G.711, GSM or whatever). The sofphone implementations I've seen always handle that codec-stuff by themselves.
If I understood the concept of Alsa correctly, it should be possible to implement the different codecs as PCM plugins and "route the sound" through them:
Soundcard <--> PCM-Plugin-Codec <--> Softphone
By defining several "routes", usage of different codecs would be simple, as long as it exists in the form of a PCM plugin. Benefit: handling of sound stuff is delegated to a part of the system that already has everything it needs to care about this task: Alsa. The softphone itself just needs to know which path is handling which Codec, and just has to read/write from/to that path.
Are these assumptions correct? If so, do you have any pointers for me where I can learn more about the implementation of such PCM plugins?
As you most likely can see, I'm unaware of the correct terms in the Alsa context (for example, I'm sure that you don't actually talk of "paths" for what I've described above). Please bear with me, I'm new to this stuff :)
I'd like to hear your oppinion about this idea. Would it be possible to do? Is it a good idea to go this path?
Bye, Mike
------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-devel
