[pulseaudio-discuss] weirdly choppy sound with remote ALSA plugin, only if pavucontrol is not running (!)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sat, 09.01.10 23:06, Nix (nix at esperi.org.uk) wrote:

> I've just tried to use the PulseAudio ALSA plugin for the first time (I
> thought it might be a better way to do remote audio than relying on
> everything supporting bloody esound, and alas some things just don't do
> anything else).
> 
> Unfortunately the results are not pretty. With no other clients connected,
> I get at best very choppy sound, often culminating in an outright hang
> after a few seconds. Sample backtrace with random program (mpg123):
> 
> (gdb) bt
> #0  0x00007f36d834c533 in poll () from /lib/libc.so.6
> #1  0x00007f36d79793de in snd1_pcm_wait_nocheck (pcm=0x1a87350, timeout=-1) at pcm.c:2367
> #2  0x00007f36d79796a5 in snd1_pcm_write_areas (pcm=0x1a87350, areas=0x7fff5a2f2120, offset=0, size=576, func=0x7f36d79b5de0 <ioplug_priv_transfer_areas>) at pcm.c:6646
> #3  0x00007f36d79b60fb in snd_pcm_ioplug_writei (pcm=0x1a87350, buffer=<value optimized out>, size=576) at pcm_ioplug.c:561
> #4  0x00007f36d7c07336 in write_alsa (ao=<value optimized out>,
>     buf=0x7f36cc9ad010 "!\354\272\352\177\344\342\353\267\350\226\352\277\367v\360i\374f\367\335\363\022\365\307\362\340\363\233\376Y\374?\004\v\002\235\374\067\376\021\372\316\374\347\003\376\002R\t\352\005\276\005\345\002I\006b\005\200\t\266\f\351\005\267\v\027", bytes=<value optimized out>) at alsa.c:207
> #5  0x00000000004036d6 in flush_output (ao=0x1a44fd0,
>     bytes=0x7f36cc9ad010 "!\354\272\352\177\344\342\353\267\350\226\352\277\367v\360i\374f\367\335\363\022\365\307\362\340\363\233\376Y\374?\004\v\002\235\374\067\376\021\372\316\374\347\003\376\002R\t\352\005\276\005\345\002I\006b\005\200\t\266\f\351\005\267\v\027", count=<value optimized out>) at audio.c:594
> #6  0x000000000040c721 in play_frame () at mpg123.c:598
> #7  0x000000000040dd2b in main (sys_argc=<value optimized out>, sys_argv=<value optimized out>) at mpg123.c:1074
> 
> (symptoms also observed with qemu, world of goo and scorched3d, yes I
> tried to run *that* over the network, I'm a glutton for punishment).
> 
> This only happens with a remote connection: a local connection, even
> using the ALSA plugin, works fine. (This is a mostly-idle gigabit
> network, so I doubt network saturation is to blame).

Could you please try
http://git.0pointer.de/?p=pulseaudio.git;a=patch;h=8d356659e69556fa25d0579a66084f820683e2b8
and see if that fixes things for you?

How do you acces the other server? directly or via module-tunnel?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4