Now that I've discovered the way of setting hardware devices in http://mail.google.com/mail/#settings/chat , there's issues that limit my using GoogleTalkPlugin to "[Logitech USB Headset]" -- a USB headset that works well. However, (1) I have an old Hauppauge PVR-500 dual analog TV card and /opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin thinks it's a video camera for chatting. However, the PVR-500 doesn't work w/ Google Talk, causing people to attempt to contact by video, but then failing due to this video device. (However, I could hook up an external old camcorder that outputs composite or svideo to the PVR500 and it would nicely hardware mpeg-encode the signal for me, however GoogleTalkPlugin doesn't seem to recognize any of the output formats.) There doesn't seem to be a way of telling it not to use a video camera because i don't have one on this computer. (2) Attempting to connect a variety of soundcards for input and output, I found that many, including motherboard soundcards and built-in snd-hda-intel hardware cannot talk to the GoogleTalkPlugin. The following errors are issued for output: (a) sample format mismatch (seen on Terratec DMX6Fire and M-Audio Delta 66). ALSA lib pcm.c:7320:(snd_pcm_set_params) Sample format not available for PLAYBACK: Invalid argument ALSA lib pcm.c:7320:(snd_pcm_set_params) Sample format not available for CAPTURE: Invalid argument (above occurs talking to an envy24/ice1712's analog capture or pcm outs. ... this error doesn't occur talking to the cards's 2-channels of spdif output, or capturing from the spdif input. For the output case, the spdif output can be sent to the card's built-in digital mixer, which can then be routed (via http://mudita24.googlecode.com or envy24control(1)) to the appropriate analog output for listening on headphones and works correctly with GoogleVoicePlugin... unfortunately, w/o a hardware spdif loopback this hack doesn't work for using the card's microphone input). (b) Channel count mismatch on Playback with totally standard output devices, both motherboard and USB: ALSA lib pcm.c:7326:(snd_pcm_set_params) Channels count (1) not available for PLAYBACK: Invalid argument (this seems to happen with some USB stereo soundcards and the motherboard via snd-hda-intel audio hardware, when connecting to "front" device.) Note that these audio issues would probably not occur if I was running pulseaudio, however, it is a mistake for Google to assume that everybody in Linuxland uses pulseaudio. (And even if pulseaudio were running, there'd be similar problems talking to multichannel soundcards such as the M-audio delta series). It sure would be nice to use the Terratec Dmx6Fire's handy microphone input with a sensitivity knob, overload-LED, etc, and built-in digital mixer, hardware-metering, and full control via http://mudita24.googlecode.com working properly, as it's nice being able to have proper microphone metering, and full mixer control for audio input/output... However, the current limitations seem to make that difficult. Perhaps my earlier "wrappering" approach and setting up a separate ALSA environment for google talk was the right way after all, at least for such "prosumer" soundcards. That way I could use plughw to match bit depths on PCM output; I'd have to figure out how to do that on input. How exactly could one work around "ALSA lib pcm.c:7320:(snd_pcm_set_params) Sample format not available for CAPTURE: Invalid argument" for capture inputs? Is there anything like plughw that works for capture too? -- Niels. http://nielsmayer.com _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
