Not long ago 4Front Technologies open sourced their OSSv4 system. OSSv4 is a much improved version of the old OSS sound system that used to be in the kernel. OSSv4 will also be the official new sound system for OpenSolaris. With OSSv4 being open source it became important to support it well in GStreamer and in GNOME. Due to this we at Collabora Multimedia have been working with 4Front to make sure everything works well. Tim-Philipp Muller has been working on some new OSSv4 elements for GStreamer for some time now with the goal being to make things like the GNOME mixer and so on works perfectly if you install OSSv4 on your linux or FreeBSD system. We are not there yet, but we are getting closer.
These plugins are currently in gst-plugins-bad, but once we get some wider testing of them we hope to move them to gst-plugins-good. A nice feature is that since the OSSv4 plugin doesn’t need OSSv4 installed to build the plugins will build on all linux systems. This means that they are very likely to be shipped as part of the GStreamer plugins coming with your distro and thus all you need to do to enable OSSv4 on your linux box is grab the OSSv4 package from 4Front.
Some things still need a little polish, so no screenshots at this time, but if you are using OSSv4 on your system please grab CVS gst-plugins-bad and report any issues you find to bugzilla.
Dude, what a waste of time.
OSS4 is something like a zombie. We all thought it was dead for many years.
@blah: It is not a waste of time. OSSv4 is actually a very capable sound system and will be the primary sound system on OpenSolaris (and I wouldnt be suprised also on FreeBSD). Don’t knock it just because you yourself do not have a personal use for something.
OSSv4 seems very nice, indeed! Too bad things were handled like they were back in the days. I’m quite certain Linux will stay with ALSA. At first that bugged me, because ALSA is so obviously not cross-platform. Then I realized that it doesn’t matter, OSS and/or ALSA should be kept very low level. Userspace applications, such as pulseaudio, on the other hand, should support both architectures equally well. (I’ve fallen in love with pulseaudio, although I don’t think it supports OSSv4 very well).