[GnomeMeeting-list] odd audio failure

[wapembe wapembe org]

a friend and i were able to get gnomemeeting working between our places.
since he was using netmeeting to talk with his dad i suggested we get things
working between gnomemeeting and netmeeting first so he could transistion to
gnomemeeting on his end when talking with his dad.  that way he would be in a
better position to stop using microsoft at his place.

we were able to do this fairly easily.  the next thing we worked on was
gnomemeeting between our two places and this was also fairly easy.

a week later we decided to test again in preparation for a demo to our local
computer club and we no longer could get the system to work.  video between
the two locations was fine but the audio is broken.  i can receive his audio
but nothing is transmitted to him.

we have checked the audio connections, tested a machine loopback audio test,
and had a friend come over with a laptop to test on my local lan and
connecting to him remotely.  the laptop and my computer can use gnomemeeting
with no problem.  yet when the laptop attempts to connect to the remote site
the same problem is experienced; video in both direction but audio only from
the remote site.  so, the feeling is this may be some filter issue with a
firewall.

oh, the looptest works just fine for all parties and i can either use a mic
from a headset or from the webcam.  my main audio system is alsa (emu10k1
sound card) and the webcam is usb audio.

we then put a machine outside of the firewall ruleset but the result was the
same; bidirectional video with audio only being received here.

so we dropped back to netmeeting on his end and everything works just fine.
video and audio in both directions.

so, we are understandably stumped.  the only change on my end was the
installation of dropline (i'm running slackware 9.0) in order to get the
gnome2 support (since i prefer galeon for a browser).

(nb. dropline is a collection of libraries and executables for gnome2 support)

if dropline was the culprit i would expect failure on a local lan as well but
that isn't the case.

if there was some filter with the cable company i would expect them to filter
the video (should be the major bandwidth consumer) in both direction but only
audio in one direction is failing.

of note is that i no longer have speex support.  i think this may be due to
dropline but the maintainer of dropline says he still has speex support on his
system.  and the speex libraries are installed on my local machine.

so, i'm at the end of ideas of things to try.  i've upgraded from .96-1 to .98
but the problem persists.

i'm at the point of ripping out all the gnomemeeting support and trying to
compile from scratch.  before i do this i want to hear from this group to see
if there is some obvious (or not so obvious) things to try to get this to
work.

looking at the general history shows the audio connection being established
but i see nothing about specific channels.

does anyone have a suggestion of which way to go from here?

thanks.
bill