Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/lpc-bluez-maemo-2009.html

Last week I’ve been at the Linux Plumbers Conference in
Portland. Like last year it kicked ass and proved again being one of the most
relevant Linux developer conferences (if not the most relevant one). I
ran the Audio MC at the conference which was very well attended. The slides
for our four talks in the
track are available online. (My own slides are probably a bit too terse
for most readers, the interesting stuff was in the talking, not the
reading…) Personally, for me the most interesting part was to see to which
degree Nokia actually adopted PulseAudio
in the N900. While I was aware that Nokia was using it, I wasn’t aware that
their use is as comprehensive as it turned out it is. And the industry
support from other companies is really impressive too. After the main track we
had a BoF session, which notes I’ll post a bit later. Many thanks to Paul,
Jyri, Pierre for their great talks. Unfortunately, Palm, the only manufacturer
who is actually already shipping a phone with PulseAudio didn’t send anyone to
the conference who wanted to talk about that. Let’s hope they’ll eventually
learn that just throwing code over the wall is not how Open Source works.
Maybe they’ll send someone to next year’s LPC in Boston, where I hope to be
able to do the Audio MC again.

Right now I am at the BlueZ Summit in Stuttgart. Among other things we have
been discussing how to improve Bluetooth Audio support in PulseAudio. I guess
one could say thet the Bluetooth support in PulseAudio is already one of its
highlights, in fact working better then the support on other OSes (yay, that’s
an area where Linux Audio really shines!). So up next is better support for
allowing PA to receive A2DP audio, i.e. making PA act as if it was a Headset or
your hifi. Use case: send music from from your mobile to your desktop’s hifi
speakers. (Actually this is already support in current BlueZ/PA versions, but
not easily accessible). Also Bluetooth headsets tend to support AC3 or MP3
decoding natively these days so we should support that in PA too. Codec
handling has been on the TODO list for PA for quite some time, for the SPDIF or
HDMI cases, and Bluetooth Audio is another reason why we really should have
that.

Next week I’ll be at the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam.
Nokia kindly invited me. Unfortunately I was a bit too late to get a proper
talk accepted. That said, I am sure if enough folks are interested we could do
a little ad-hoc BoF and find some place at the venue for it. If you have any
questions regarding PA just talk to me. The N900 uses PulseAudio for all things
audio so I am quite sure we’ll have a lot to talk about.

See you in Amsterdam!

One last thing: Check out Colin’s
work to improve integration of PulseAudio and KDE!