When I used Skype, I was hearing people just fine. However when I talked, I lagged. And the lag got very bad very quickly. It would gain an extra second of lag for every 3 seconds in conference... talking or not. Here is the solution.. perhaps the solution could be mentioned in brief after emerging skype or something? 1) In KDE CC, go to Sound System. Enable realtime priority, and cut the buffer ALL THE WAY DOWN. Remember full duplex must be enabled here as well. 2) Instead of just starting Skype, start it with: artsdsp -m skype This was the only thing that worked for me. Skype says to try and cut down the buffer in ARTS to under 200 ms ... that didn't cut it. I had to bring it ALL THE WAY down and run it under realtime priority. I talked to a friend with similar hardware and this worked for him too... so I'm guessing I'm not the only one this would work for. I realize this is probably an upstream issue, but all I'm after is a message to somebody emerging skype .. this seems to be a universal lag fix for skype on KDE. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge skype 2. Open skype ... either using ALSA w/ OSS emulation or with artsdsp -m skype 3. Talk to somebody. Actual Results: Lag.... AWFUL lag Expected Results: Very short (1 to 3 sec) lag # eix arts * kde-base/arts Available versions: 1.2.3 1.3.2 1.3.2-r1 ~3.4.0 ~3.4.1 ~3.4.1-r1 ~3.4.1-r2 Installed: 3.4.1-r2 Homepage: http://multimedia.kde.org/ Description: aRts, the KDE sound (and all-around multimedia) server/output manager # eix skype * net-im/skype Available versions: ~1.0.0.7 1.0.0.20 ~1.1.0.3 ~1.1.0.3-r1 ~1.1.0.13 Installed: 1.1.0.13 Homepage: http://www.skype.com/ Description: skype is a P2P-VoiceIP client. # uname -r 2.6.11-gentoo-r11 --- kernel ALSA ------ ALSA driver emu10k1 (Sound Blaster Audigy MP3+) ------ ALSA OSS emulation layer
So the main problem is that arts is a laggy sound server, but on the other hand we cannot suggest to cut down arts lag by giving it real time priority, as it is known to cause a lot of problems (e.g. hard system lockups)... I don't see what we can do...
yeah, don't know how we can fix it..
