[gst-devel] gstreamer interaction with Gnome

[Jim McCloskey]

I hope it's OK to ask for help with user difficulties on this list. I
am at my wits' end trying to understand this problem and nobody on the
Debian lists has been able to help.

OS: Debian testing (squeeze)
libgstreamer0.10-0, version 0.10.26

The problem has to do with audio playback:

All basic alsa applications work fine (aplay, alsaplayer, mpg321,
ogg123 etc); audio playback with mplayer (and derivatives) works fine;
audio playback with xine (and derivatives) works fine.

But with all and only the audio players that use gstreamer as their
backend (rhythmbox, banshee, listen and so on), the track seems to
play, no errors are reported, but there is silence.

However, this on the command-line:

  gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="miles-ahead.ogg" ! oggdemux ! vorbisdec ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! alsasink

produces great audio playback, as does this:

  gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="conamara.mp3" ! mad ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! alsasink

Also this:

   gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="coinnleach.wav" ! wavparse ! alsasink

works great.

   gst-launch-0.10 audiotestsrc ! alsasink

produces a pure tone.

All of this seems to suggest that there is nothing inherently wrong
either with the gstreamer setup or with the alsa setup.

However, this:

   gst-launch-0.10 playbin uri=file:///home/jim/Music/coinnleach.wav
   gst-launch-0.10 playbin2 uri=file:///home/jim/Music/coinnleach.wav

produces no errors:

    Setting pipeline to PAUSED ...
    Pipeline is PREROLLING ...
    Pipeline is PREROLLED ...
    Setting pipeline to PLAYING ...
    New clock: GstPulseSinkClock

but produces only silence.  No audible playback. If Gnome applications
in general use playbin or playbin2, perhaps this is the ultimate source 
of the problem?

Any help, or pointers to relevant documentation, would be really appreciated.

Thank you very much,

Jim