No Skype Microphone Input In OpenSUSE 12.2 this time

English Multimedia
1

Hello,

Updated to OpenSUSE 12.2 64-bits a few weeks ago (and applied all the latest patches today + rebooted for good measure).
While most things worked really well and more stable than before, Skype audio INPUT does not work. Specifically, I hear
all Skype sounds and sounds in other applications and I can record audio using ‘arecord’ but Skype does not record anything.
Sound works in other applications, Chrome, VLC, Flash, etc.

Coincidentally I had the same problem upgrading to 12.1 and got a solution in this forum. Unfortunately did not work this time.
I went through the updated Skype information here and found nothing to be of use. The only thing it says for audio input not
working is to change the audio device and I tried them all one-by-one. Nothing worked.

Any ideas? If not, what information would be helpful in solving this?

Thanks in advance,

2

For the curious, the problem in OpenSUSE 12.1 was that I had no /dev/mixer device.
Turns out that in 12.2 I have both /dev/mixer and /dev/mixer1 … I have no idea why.
This is exactly the same hardware. There is no sound card, only onboard sound
on an AMD 785 chipset and HDMI OUT on the graphics cards.

Also I have the latest Skype 4.0.0.8 from skype.com as an RPM file.

Does this help?

Thanks again!

3

I have exactly the same issue. Updated, sound works, microphone does not. Downloaded the Pulse Audio Settings and tools to test. It shows the microphone is indeed working and capturing input, Skype is just not picking it up for some reason. Help?

4

I documented what worked for me with my mic and openSUSE-12.1 in this blog post: Pulseaudio Basics for openSUSE with pavucontrol - Blogs - openSUSE Forums I have not tried 12.2 but it would surprise me if the same does not work on my hardware.

5

Good to know I am not the only one with the problem. I have just spend over an hour trying different things to pin-point the problem without success.
So far, it really seems an interaction between Skype and OpenSUSE 12.2.

Since I upgraded Skype at the same time as the OS, I though the new 4.0.0.8 was buggy. I found an old backup with the version 2.1.0.81 which works
with OpenSUSE 12.1 on the same hardware and it still does not record audio (again, output is fine, just no mic). This rules out a bug with this specific
version of Skype.

Also switched microphone ports from front to rear and no avail. Again, microphone audio works gets to the Mixer, just not to Skype.

Now with 12.1, PulseAudio wrecked havoc on my system and so I have not been using it since. This morning I gave 12.2 a chance with PulseAudio
and it installed but did not work. Simply gave errors to the effect that it could not connect or something similar. At least, it does not stop other programs,
including Skype, from outputting audio. So again, PulseAudio has trouble with my system, two OpenSUSE versions in a row.

Going to Skype’s site, I see that the libraries requested are different than the ones present on my 12.2 system. Could this be the cause? Here are
the libs in question:

Qt 4.4.0 asked, have 4.8.1-2.1.4
D-Bus 1.0.0 asked, have 1.5.12-4.6.1
libasound2 1.0.18 asked, have 1.0.25-3.5.1
PulseAudio 0.9.16 (optional) asked, have libpulse0 and libpulse-mainloop-glib0 1.1-6.4.1
BlueZ 4.0.0 (optional) asked, have 4.99-4.1.2

All my OpenSUSE 12.2 64-bits packages are up to date and I use less than 10 third-party RPMs. nothing sound-related, mostly dev tools.

Any ideas what to try next?

Thanks in advance,

  • Itai
6

Sorry I have no suggestions.

In my experience, to help someone else, one typically has to struggle a bit themselves, so that one is forced to learn a bit more about the system. In my case with pulse audio this ‘just worked’. I have now tested Skype with openSUSE-12.2 in a guest partition on my PC and again with Pulse Audio it ‘just worked’. This is with a KDE desktop in both cases … So unfortunately, because it was so smooth, I was not asked to dig inside the innards to get it working and hence learned nothing more than what I noted on the blog entry I referenced above.

Someone who has struggled, and then succeeded, needs to pitch in here.