problem with movie player and orca

[Peter Parente]

Hi,

I believe Rhythmbox and Totem both use ALSA to talk to the sound
hardware on your machine. ALSA has the nice capability of mixing
multiple streams of audio across applications. On the other hand, most
(if not all) speech synthesizers use the older OSS sound library to
talk to your sound card. A conflict occurs when an app using OSS and
another using ALSA try to send output to the same device. Typically,
one will block indefinitely until the other releases the device.

SpeechDispatcher is looking to address this problem by routing output
from OSS synthesizers through ALSA when possible. For instance, IBM
TTS (ViaVoice) can return  the raw speech waveform to an application
instead of outputing it directly. An app can do whatever it wants with
the waveform (e.g. send it to ALSA).  I'm not sure how mature this
support is in SpeechDispatcher at present.

LSR 0.3.0 has support for routing IBM TTS speech through a free, but
closed source third-party mixing library that output using ALSA.
Directions on how to configure LSR to use this library will be
available when 0.3.0 is released at the end of the month.

Pete