diff libpurple/mediamanager.c @ 31356:017b7ff5a894

During a voice call, Pidgin now sends constant audio traffic, even when there is silence. Especially on slower connections, this can waste considerable amount of bandwidth by transmitting nothing but ambient noise. I used peak level data from GstLevel? in the input branch of media pipeline to control a GstValve? put between audio source and Farsight confbin. Whenever the peak drops below defined threshold, the valve gets closed, when sound level reaches above the threshold, valve opens again. This effectively blocks sending data over network in the silent periods and in my tests this simple method worked quite well. Silence threshold might need to be fine tuned (or switched off at all) depending on microphone hardware and/or the noisiness of surrounding environment. I will propose an user interface for this in a separate ticket. Future improvement can be adding support for comfort noise (RFC3389), as the line now stays completely mute when suppression is active, which can be a bit distracting. I made a tiny change in level parameter that is passed to PurpleMedia?'s "level" signal handlers. The value converted from dB to percent was multiplied by five. Searching through source code history seems this was done to make the value variation displayed on call dialog level meter widgets look bigger. I think it is better not to confuse future developers and pass the unmodified percent value to the handler and multiply only in gtkmedia.c: level_message_cb() where it has reason. committer: John Bailey <[e-mail]>

--- a/libpurple/mediamanager.c	Sun Mar 13 17:40:04 2011 +0000
+++ b/libpurple/mediamanager.c	Sun Mar 13 18:00:58 2011 +0000
@@ -175,6 +175,7 @@
 
 	purple_prefs_add_none("/purple/media");
 	purple_prefs_add_none("/purple/media/audio");
+	purple_prefs_add_int("/purple/media/audio/silence_threshold", 5);
 	purple_prefs_add_none("/purple/media/audio/volume");
 	purple_prefs_add_int("/purple/media/audio/volume/input", 10);
 	purple_prefs_add_int("/purple/media/audio/volume/output", 10);