VLC webcam streaming lacks audio [RESOLVED]

[kitsunenokenja]

I've been working on this for about three days, looking for information I need to know to figure out what the problem is. What I'm trying to do is use VLC to offer an audio/video feed of my mic and webcam as the quality this way is at the best it can be instead of relying on whatever Flash inherently uses. I already solved the first problem (I was using old-style device names like /dev/dsp1 instead of a proper ALSA name like hw:2,0 which I use now, and this works correctly.)

I can view the camera with VLC locally with the audio device specified and I can see just fine and the audio is outputted so I know the mic is being used. For some reason, when I try to use VLC with streaming, the result never has sound. I tried switching between H.264/MP3 and MP4 to see if the codec had something to do with it in the transcoding, but apparently not. To simplify testing I replaced streaming as RTP server with stream to a file, and when I play the file back mplayer reports it has no audio track at all.

Verbose output of VLC during the stream initialization didn't show anything unusual to me (unless I missed something) but most importantly it did list it was using the hw:2,0 ALSA device as expected so it's not a misconfiguration with that regard. (By the way, this is VLC 1.0.1.)

I've looked on these forums, VLC's forums, and in general on the net for info about this problem, which seems to spring up here and there but I can't find a solution or at least understand what the problem is.

Not sure what output or other info might be helpful to figure out this issue but I can post what need be if asked. If someone can help me figure out how to fix this, that'd be great. I'd really like to permanently abandon using Flash's inherent tool since the video quality is rubbish.
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[DaggyStyle]

have you loaded snd-audio-usb?
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[kitsunenokenja]

Apparently I wasn't really doing anything wrong. VLC 1.0.2 was available and I built it, and sure enough my problem went away. Yes, I did have the USB Audio module built and loaded into the kernel; that is how I was able to unmute the microphone and determine the ALSA device ordered pair for it.

The only minor issue is randomly VLC will claim the ALSA device cannot be opened (or, more rarely, the video device cannot be opened) but simply retrying a few times gets around this. I don't understand why it makes these claims when they're not true. I literally do nothing special in between attempts, it simply works properly with persistence.

Tips for anyone who encountered the same problem: go to VLC 1.0.2+ and make sure you are specifying the ALSA device in the proper format. VLC expects it as alsa://hw:X,Y where X,Y specify the audio device you want to use.
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