[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio elusive

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Jack Tanner at 07/12/08 07:01 did gyre and gimble:
>   Is PA right for me? I use my Fedora 10 box for vlc, mpd, and MythTV. 
> PA should play nicely with them under F10, right?
> 
> How do I get started? I've two audio cards, the on-board VIA (unused) 
> and the add-in Audigy2 (used). I can get gnome-sound-properties *but not 
> vlc* to play through Audigy2 Multichannel Playback (ALSA). paplay makes 
> no noise either. pulseaudio is running, and there are no errors in 
> /var/log/messages.
> 
> Ideally, I'd make Pulseaudio the default sink and route everything 
> through it, but I've no idea how. I looked at 
> http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup , but I think my F10 is 
> already configured that way.


Well the main tool that is used when you have PA underneath is 
pavucontrol. This app will allow you to work with all your currently 
running streams and allow you to change the device they use etc. Once 
you change this setting it should be remembered from then on (e.g. pulse 
will know that VLC prefers to be on the Audigy, MythTV prefers the VIA etc.)

pavucontrol also let's you set the "default" sink, so that brand new 
streams will go through your preferred device by default. This does not 
apply to applications that have already played as they will be 
remembered as perfering the device they were first played on (IMO this 
is suboptimal and there should be a concept of "default" built in to the 
stream remembering stuff - this will come eventually I'm sure).

VLC now has a pulse output module. I'm not sure if that is the official 
version nor if it is part of the vlc package on F10, but I'd imagine so.

Also there is a patch for MythTV that adds pulse support too (I rediffed 
it recently).
http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/5473

Also in order to get pulse to do multichannel you have to set the 
channels to 6 (for 5.1) in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf (there may be a 
config program to do this in F10, I'm not familiar with it - we have a 
GUI in Mandriva I know that much :))

HTHs

Col




-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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