# General multimedia issues w/ FreeBSD



## sarumont (Aug 23, 2011)

As it stands now, I have one machine which is storage/home server and workstation running FreeBSD. I work from home 100% of the time (well, with the occasional trip to get all the devs in one room for a week). A few factors are coming together here to make me question the viability of FreeBSD going forward for my desktop needs.


I'm being moved to Denver (yay!) where we have a new office. I'll be splitting my time (probably 3 days at home, 2 in the office)
The office IT setup is hotel-like: standard laptop and docking station (Dell Inspiron E6420).
I'm getting into Twilio/OpenVBX development.
I hope to have time to work on some Android stuff (not a large issue at this juncture).

I get my new company-issued laptop tomorrow, and I'm seriously considering whether or not I will hinder myself by using FreeBSD. I plan to have a 2nd docking station at home and reduce my current desktop to a home server (lower power CPU/mobo, smaller chassis).

FINALLY, on to the issues I'm facing (8.2-STABLE w/ up to date ports, for the record):


Twilio client does not work in FreeBSD. I have Flash working, and sound works with it. When accessing the Twilio client from Linux/Windows, a Flash popup asks for permission to use the mic. No such popup is shown under FreeBSD (chromium or FF).
The Google voice and video browser plugin does not work. I highly doubt Google will resolve this, as they don't like us BSD users.  The main use I have for this is taking/making calls via Google Voice from my machine. They won't ring inbound calls for any clients signed into Google Talk other than the browser, afaik (gajim doesn't work because Google is still using a hacked-up jingle, and I haven't tried pidgin in ~3-4 months).
Minor/Resolvable issues: bsdroid seems abandoned. I'm sure this could be made to work given some time and effort. Ekiga doesn't work for me at all - could be my config, Ekiga or the port. Again, that's resolvable if I throw some time at it. Bluetooth headsets are not supported in FreeBSD. Not sure if this is currently being worked on - not a biggie, as the laptop will have a built-in mic (which should work more fluidly (and with OSSv4) than my current USB mic).

There are other things that may not work which I will only know about once I get the hardware, but most of those aren't related to multimedia.

Does anyone have any insight to either of the first 2? Workarounds, solutions, etc. all welcome. Cheers!


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