view README.MTN @ 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]>

If you plan to use Pidgin, Finch and libpurple from our Monotone repository,
PLEASE read this message in its entirety!

Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple are a fast-moving project with a somewhat regular
release schedule.  Due to the rate of development, the code in our Monotone
repository undergoes frequent bursts of massive changes, often leaving behind
brokenness and partial functionality while the responsible developers rewrite
some portion of code or seek to add new features.

What this all boils down to is that the code in our Monotone repository _WILL_
sometimes be broken.  Because of this, we ask that users who are not interested
in personally tracking down bugs and fixing them (without a lot of
assistance from the developers!) use only released versions.  Since releases
will be made often, this should not prevent anyone from using the newest,
shiniest features -- but it will prevent users from having to deal with ugly
development bugs that we already know about but haven't gotten around to fixing.

If you are interested in hacking on Pidgin, Finch, and/or libpurple, please
check out the information available at: http://developer.pidgin.im

By far the best documentation, however, is the documented code.  If you have
doxygen, you can run "make docs" in the toplevel directory to generate pretty
documentation.  Otherwise (or even if you do!), the header files for each
subsystem contain documentation for the functions they contain.  For instance,
conversation.h contains documentation for the entire purple_conversation_*
API, and account.h contains documentation for the purple_account_* API.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact the Pidgin, Finch, and
libpurple developers by email at [e-mail] or on IRC at irc.freenode.net
in #pidgin.  Please do as much homework as you can before contacting us; the
more you know about your question, the faster and more effectively we can help!

Patches should be posted as Trac tickets at: http://developer.pidgin.im