Need help with legacy hardware and audio grabbing

numpad5 · #1 September 6th, 2012, 02:51

I have recently found a way to stream desktop grabbing with ffmpeg raw over my lan to a faster computer than the one I'm grabbing from and encode on the faster computer, so that I can do screen grabbing on a PC as old as my 1996/1997 200MHz pentium asus and encode it at a very decent rate for this hardware.

Some things can capture the sound as well, but some things can't.

For example, if I pipe the output of esdmon, and am running "esd zsnes" with some game loaded in the emulator I usually get pretty good sound rate.

I can't however, capture sound from wine yet.

Most of the problems I've run into doing this have been around my pre2000 hardware I am running the wine on under FreeBSD 8.2-release.

I wanted to go the easy way and set recording device to vol with alsa, or go with oss4 from packages/ports, but have not had success getting oss4 to work since the soundcard is an isa soundblaster awe64 pnp, and the vol recording device is unsupported on this hardware.

I almost got it working with padsp from pulseaudio, but it usually kills my userspace pulse daemon and the pulse is very laggy on my old hardware.

I have tried several other soundservers too, like arts, but no success yet.

Trying to record straight from normal FreeBSD 8.2-release legacy oss device gives a file is busy error since the sound has to be played to record from it.

I mostly use this PC for games and messing around with graphics stuff, anyway I am leaning towards a couple solutions:

-upgrading to latest FreeBSD-stable (I am in the process of doing a harddrive backup of my home and user data and will test latest stable with this hardware on another harddrive I might have handy)

-using a newer soundcard and going with oss4, I might be able to find a sbpci compatible card somewhere that will work with this machine, it has pci ports but the particular card happens to be isa

-using usb speakers that don't require a soundcard. If I have to spend money on this old hardware I'd rather do the usb speakers since I can swap them to other old machines - and newer ones, but I don't have much experience with usb speakers and have no idea which ones would work well with sound redirection I am trying to do.

I was really hoping I could get wine to work with esound's esddsp but when I do "esddsp wine" it just exits out with no explanation whatsoever and comes back up with sh terminal prompt instead of running wine at all.

If no one has a software solution other than upgrading to latest stable, then anyone in the know please give advice on the usb speaker way I am thinking of - what usb speakers work well and if they have sound redirection support.

I will try to post normal dmesg so you can see my hardware as well as pkg_info output so you can see software versions.

I just run this old machine as an extra home desktop, not a server somewhere that will have lots of security issues and stuff, so I don't mind changing permissions or something if I must or opening a firewall if that becomes a problem with this.

The one thing I haven't tried that I have available to me right now is trying to get wine to have alsa output (not sure if I can on this setup) and using arecord to do the audio grab.

Advice appreciated. Will try to attach dmesg and pkg_info outputs.

Attached outputs.tgz was made with

Code:

tar -vzcf outputs.tgz

Just so you know its file format.

numpad5 · #2 September 11th, 2012, 04:14

Wanted to mark this as solved.

After researching it seems that oss_usb module isn't included in FreeBSD 8 I am using. So that kills the usb speaker option.

Also, I looked around in some of my old legacy hardware collection and found a pci soundcard that is compatible with oss4, I'll swap it out into the computer I'm wanting to desktop and audio grab for the desired functionality.

I already tested ossrecord from an app on the legacy hardware the pci card is currently in, using a vmix loop device, it worked.

It will mean recompiling a few sound modules for the other old machine to support the awe64 I will put into it but that is no big deal.

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