[nas] firefox audio solution?

[Paul Fox]

erik wrote:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > On Sun, Feb 10, 2008 at 12:30:15PM -0500, Paul Fox wrote:
 > > i believe that previous versions of firefox worked with audiooss,
 > > but current (2.0) versions do not, at least for me.  i'm assuming
 > > that newer firefox releases no longer use the oss path that
 > > audiooss intercepts.
 > 
 > It still does, you might to set the environment variable ICEWEASEL_DSP
 > (since I use debian, I don't know if it's FIREFOX_DSP for an official
 > browser) to the right value. Since this is called "/dev/dsp wrapper" by
 > the iceweasel man-page I suppose "none" should be right.

whoa.  firefox has a manpage?  who knew?  ;-)

 > ENVIRONMENT
 >   FIREFOX_DSP - configures the /dev/dsp wrapper to use. 
 >   Accepted values are "auto", "arts", "esd" or "none" (default). 
 >   Do not use this feature to select "auto" or "esd" as this will
 >   involve using "esddsp" which is known to be buggy and to make
 >   Firefox unstable.

i'm not sure i understand this.  what _is_ the /dev/dsp wrapper that
they're talking about?  is "audio_oss" a dsp wrapper?

i found a reference on the web to setting it to "aoss" (not mentioned
above in the man page).  not sure what it would do.

in any case, setting FIREFOX_DSP to "none" or "aoss" doesn't
help.  of course, there are so many pieces of the chain that
could be misconfigured that it's a little hard to say for sure
what might or might not work.  


 > > does anyone know if it would be feasible to introduce a similar
 > > shim under alsa?  would it make more sense to try and get a new
 > > audio output (i.s.  NAS) device added the alsa repertoire?  if
 > > someone tells me such a thing already exists, i'll mail you a
 > > 6-pack of beer. 
 > 
 > I think this is feasible, but no-one did this yet AFAIK. Adding
 > something like this to ALSA would make a lot of sense, because it would
 > enable most[1] ALSA programs to output to NAS.

okay.  i'm not sure i have time right now, but i clearly have the
need.  i'll either pursue this on my own, or try to talk it up on the 
alsa list.  (of course, if anyone on this list has alsa skills and can
point me in the right direction...)

thanks,
paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 29.3 degrees)