Monday, March 03 2008 @ 02:59 PM EST Contributed by: sde
Today we're going to dig into ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, because I think it's the best tool for managing your Linux sound devices. It's good for managing multiple sound devices, and it works in all Linux environments including other window managers, or no X Windows at all.
Yes, I know that Gnome has ESD (Enlightened Sound Daemon), and KDE uses aRtsd (analog Real time synthesizer daemon). Aside from the annoying problem of having to cope with multiple sound subsystems, both ESD and aRtsd introduce complications, such as conflicts with ALSA and latency. Latency is the enemy of sound quality, especially over a network. So when you're streaming audio (either by itself or with video), using a software IP phone, or playing online games the first thing to do is turn off ESD or aRtsd and use only ALSA.
So what's up with Webcams? As one reader told me, is "the state of Webcam support in Linux is nasty and brutish." The core problems stem from lack of support from hardware vendors (get in the 21st century, folks, geez!) and inconsistent Video4Linux support. Video4Linux is the video capture API for Linux. All video capture devices and applications must use Video4Linux. That doesn't sound too bad, as it is just a single API, and as far as I know the only one. But there are two versions: the original V4L, and version 2, sometimes (but not consistently) called V4L2. Version 2 is substantially different and improved from version 1.
