view finch/gntsound.h @ 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]>

/**
 * @file gntsound.h GNT Sound API
 * @ingroup finch
 */

/* finch
 *
 * Finch is the legal property of its developers, whose names are too numerous
 * to list here.  Please refer to the COPYRIGHT file distributed with this
 * source distribution.
 *
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02111-1301  USA
 */
#ifndef _GNT_SOUND_H
#define _GNT_SOUND_H

#include "sound.h"

/**********************************************************************/
/** @name GNT Sound API                                               */
/**********************************************************************/
/*@{*/

/**
 * Get the name of the active sound profile.
 *
 * @return The name of the profile
 *
 * @since 2.1.0
 */
const char *finch_sound_get_active_profile(void);

/**
 * Set the active profile.  If the profile doesn't exist, nothing is changed.
 *
 * @param name  The name of the profile
 *
 * @since 2.1.0
 */
void finch_sound_set_active_profile(const char *name);

/**
 * Get a list of available sound profiles.
 *
 * @return A list of strings denoting sound profile names.
 *         Caller must free the list (but not the data).
 *
 * @since 2.1.0
 */
GList *finch_sound_get_profiles(void);

/**
 * Determine whether any sound will be played or not.
 *
 * @return Returns FALSE if preference is set to 'No sound', or if volume is
 *         set to zero.
 *
 * @since 2.2.0
 */
gboolean finch_sound_is_enabled(void);

/**
 * Gets GNT sound UI ops.
 *
 * @return The UI operations structure.
 *
 * @since 2.1.0
 */
PurpleSoundUiOps *finch_sound_get_ui_ops(void);

/**
 * Show the sound settings dialog.
 *
 * @since 2.1.0
 */
void finch_sounds_show_all(void);

/*@}*/

#endif