[Ekiga-list] Bluez-3.20, Bluetooth Headset & ekiga - How

[Fabien Chevalier]

Damien Sandras wrote:
> Le samedi 27 octobre 2007 à 15:06 +0200, Jakub Klawiter a écrit :
>> Hello!
>>
>> On 10/27/07, Damien Sandras <dsandras at seconix.com> wrote:
>>
>>>> :( It is not possible and will not be possible? BT headset can be very
>>>> useful for ekiga while it is not using soundcard, so You can still
>>>> listen music while talking via ekiga. And of course BT headset means
>>>> no cables ;-)
>>> It is possible, but not currently. Somebody has to implement it...
>> I understand this, my question is, what do you think somebody will ...
>> I don't know before Ekiga3? I understand that it will not be possible
>> in near future (if somebody havr to do this), but is is possible that
>> there is somebody in the Ekga team, who know how, and probably will do
>> this, because it is usefull, and it is also possible that nobody will
>> work on this task, because there is nobody (in the team) interested in
>> this feature.
>> I know the question is crazy but ...maybe it is possoble to answer. ;-)
> 
> I certainly would like that somebody does this.

Hi all,

I started to work on bluetooth audio stuff a while ago, and wrote the 
original headsetd implementation that ended up its life in the plugz 
repository. :-)

These days i work on the official audio service on the bluez project. 
The good news is that the Bluez project is starting to have good support 
for headsets, bad news is the focus is really on A2DP (multimedia 
streaming), not on voice support. :-(

If you wish to play with a headset for ekiga, you have to go to plugz, 
as the Bluez audio service is not as advanced as plugz is regarding 
voice headsets.

In the long run it might end up that audio service works with ekiga, but 
that will typically take some time as nobody's pushing for it :-(

Having sayd that, there are a number of issues, that makes Ekiga 
integration with wireless quite painfull:
   - device enumeration with ALSA does not work with pcm plugins, which 
means the headset does not appear in the devices list. I wrote a patch 
for pwlib to fix that, but this is really a hack, as it hardcodes the 
device string with no knowledge of its presence whatsoever :-(
   - Ekiga has the bad habit to close/open the multimedia stream quite 
often : e.g. it would close the alsa device after each ringtone. This 
does not work with BT headsets as they make a special very noisy "bip" 
after the multimedia stream is closed
   - Ekiga does not support when an ALSA device disappears from the 
scene, this ends up with an Ekiga crash :-(

So the path to proper bluetooth support in Ekiga is still a long ride,
however i think this will greatly improve when the audio service 
supports Pulseaudio: it could possibly solve all of the above issues :-)

I hope it brings some lights to the discussion,

Fabien