Attempting to get newer Skype to work (sound)

[Sean C. Farley]

I have been attempting to get Skype 2.1.0.81 working on FreeBSD with 
limited success.

A patch is required for a few ioctl's to work.  It fixes 
SOUND_MIXER_INFO and SOUND_OLD_MIXER_INFO to return success instead of 
defaulting to an error (ENOIOCTL).  It also adds an 
SOUND_MIXER_READ_CAPS ioctl.  No errors are seen, but I would definitely 
like someone else to review this (head[1] and stable[2]).

The next piece required is audio/linux-f10-alsa-plugins-oss.  Two PR's 
have a version of this port.  I am using the version from 
ports/147549[3] with some additions for all my system's sound devices.

Of course, since things should never be simple, I 
needed to build a patched version of the binary[4] that incorporated 
most of the code from ariff@[5].  Testing it with arecord from 
linux-f10-alsa-utils found in pr/147554[6] demonstrates a working 
microphone.  This is necessary since it is a Linux binary accessing a 
FreeBSD device directly and not through the compatibility layer.

Unfortunately, while sound output works in Skype and the microphone 
works within arecord, I cannot get Skype to use the microphone 
correctly.  It seems to detect it, but the echo service records nothing. 
In fact, after the recording portion (several seconds) is over the 
playback portion lasts less than a second.

Video does not work, but that is another adventure.  I am currently 
trying to get Skype to work at the same level it did with the older, 
more-advanced (supporting OSS) version.  :)

Suggestions and/or sympathy welcome.

Sean
   1. http://people.freebsd.org/~scf/sound/linux_ioctl-head.patch
   2. http://people.freebsd.org/~scf/sound/linux_ioctl-stable.patch
   3. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/147549
   4. http://people.freebsd.org/~scf/sound/alsa-plugins-oss-1.0.21-3.fc10.i386.rpm
   5. http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/libasound/
   6. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/147554
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org