[nas] firefox audio solution?

[Erik Auerswald]

Hi,

On Sun, Feb 10, 2008 at 02:29:49PM -0500, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > 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 don't _know_ what it is, but I think it is the firefox way to chose a
way of audio output. Since /dev/dsp is from the OSS days it might be
needed to tell firefox to use it directly.

> 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.

aoss is the user-space OSS emulation of ALSA (IIRC). You could try
"oss". I don't know if this helps.

It could be that the current firefox version doesn't use OSS any more,
it's been some time since I used libaudiooss with firefox. I think it
was firefox version 2.0.0.x...

Another way would be to use arts, tell firefox to use it and configure
arts to use nas. This is ugly as hell and kind of fragile, but it might
work(TM).

>  > > 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...)

Well, I don't have ALSA skills, and to me they seem to be a lot harder
to acquire than OSS skills (which I did not have before working on the
OSS nasd). I'd like to see this functionality in ALSA, but I won't have
the time and motivation to do it myself. :/

Erik