Re: [GnomeMeeting-devel-list] bluetooth-headset (btsco) support within ekiga

[Colin Guthrie <gnomemeeting colin guthr ie>]

Jan Falkenhagen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> i had a talk  in the ekiga irc-room five minutes ago, asking whether it
> is possible to execute a shellcommand ("$btsco adress channel") or do
> anything equivalent that would allow me to connect to my btsco-enabled
> bluetooth headset (creating the btsco audio device) when starting a call
> in ekiga. this would mainly offer two advantage over connecting when
> starting ekiga:
>
> 1) the dumb user (me) could hardly forget switching on the headset when
> actually starting a call (cause picking up the phone and starzting a
> call is somehow atomic), while if the connection has to be established
> when ekiga is started, most users won't think of turning on the headset
> before which will cause the connection to fail.
>
> 2) power consumption of the headset would be very much lower.
>
> it would be very nice if such a feature could be implemented.

I've not played with btsco for a while, but I think a more sensible 
sugguestion would be for the module/btsco application to create a 
virtual sound device when it is started. This sould device always exists 
and can be set to "passthru" to an existing sound device.

e.g. (using OSS as example for device names but this would be fine with 
ALSA devices too) Say I have sound device /dev/dsp. I load the 
snd-bt-sco module and start the btsco application. This creates 
/dev/dsp2 and takes one of two actions - if it can detect my device as 
being in range it passes audio to/from the device as per-normal 
operation - if the device is out of range then it piggy backs onto 
/dev/dsp for it's input/output.

This is a more generic setup... You'd configure ekiga to use /dev/dsp2 
and it would "just work"(tm) with your core sound device until such 
times are you turn on your BT adapter at which point it will flip across 
to that.

I don't know much about these things but I'd have thought that was a 
more flexible solution and saves devices appearing/disappearing all the 
time.

Col.