[sldev] Re: Vote for voice protocol documentation

John Hurliman jhurliman at wsu.edu
Thu Aug 16 01:46:28 PDT 2007


Matthew Dowd wrote:
> The codec is a potential problem - as the Vivox component is not redistributable and as the codec is patent protected, it essentially prevents anyone distributing standalone voice enabled software based on the SL Viewer or libsecondlife (at least not software which is useable without also installing the official viewer and merging the two).
>   

That's the route that I've been going with libsecondlife. It first looks 
in the local directory, then the system path, then uses 
platform-specific functions to locate any installs of SL and attempt to 
launch the voice daemon from there. The Vivox API manages so much by 
itself that we will have full voice support quite easily after I get a 
bit of time to work on it again. You just query it for values (like a 
list of input/output devices and the current volume) and send it 
commands through the TCP/XML pipe (like start recording, stop 
recording). I'm sure implementing some of that on Linux is slowing down 
the port, but I would guess the port is either going to be very well 
done or have early issues (work in conjunction with sound daemons like 
ESD? Support things like JACK? Set recording volumes etc). I'm also 
writing the skeleton of the voice documentation as I go while bHear team 
members fill in the holes, so hopefully I can close my own JIRA ticket 
out from the start of this sub-thread.

I think that smart open source installers or viewers are the way to 
resolve this for now. Pick up the Kakadu library while they are at it 
and get equivalent performance (or better) to the official viewer, along 
with full voice support in a legitimate distribution. There are no usage 
rights in question here, only distribution rights and this is a common 
solution in Gentoo ebuilds. I don't have enough experience with Fedora, 
but would it also work there Callum?

> The jira on voice and linux makes interesting reading - with LL saying all the link is there but they need a "blob" from Vivox for Linux, and Vivox saying they fully support Linux and the delay is entirely in LL's court...
>
>   

(http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-210 contains the comments)



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