[talk] Jitsi on OpenBSD

[Jonathan Drews]

Hi Folks:

 I saw your posts on running Jitsi. Here is how I got it working on
 OpenBSD 6.9. 


Audio is disabled in OpenBSD. Read this:
Audio recording is now disabled by default in OpenBSD
https://www.zdnet.com/article/audio-recording-is-now-disabled-by-default-in-openbsd/

Here are my notes on configuring audio and video on OpenBSD.

The primary reference is:

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq13.html
in addition to the man pages.
 To get audio and video working on OpenBSD:

Add yourself to group wheel in /etc/group. Do as root:
# chmod g+rw /dev/video0
or whatever your video device is. Find it in dmesg.

In  /etc/sysctl.conf (file is in /etc/examples) add:

kern.audio.record=1
kern.video.record=1

Add the following lines to /etc/mixerctl.conf (mixerctl.conf
is in /etc/examples).

# $OpenBSD: mixerctl.conf,v 1.1 2014/07/16 13:21:33 deraadt Exp $
#
# mixerctl(1) configurable parameters. See mixerctl.conf(5) for
details.
#

# output volume value for most audio cards
# outputs.master=200
record.adc-0:1=240,240
record.adc-0:1_source=mic
record.enable=on
record.adc-0:1_source=mic3

You'll have to experiment as your laptop may not have the same
entries as my mixerctl.conf. Invariably they should begin with
"record." Do # mixerctl -av  to find the settings

As an aid in getting your microphone to work use aucat (see man 1
aucat).
To do a test recoding do:
$ aucat -i test.wav
to play back the rscording, to see if your microphone is working do:
$ aucat -o test.wav

I have used Jitsi several times from my OpenBSD T420 Laptop. The
only difficulty was sharing my desktop. Firefox froze when doing
that. My guess is that happens because of pledge. Video and audio
worked great. Response times can be bad if you use Jitsi over WiFi.
I switched to ethernet and my signal strength improved.

To adjust the volume of the microphone and speakers use cmixer.
cmixer is in packages.

--
Kind regards,
Jonathan