[pulseaudio-discuss] console volume control

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Brandon Kuczenski at 23/05/10 21:01 did gyre and gimble:
> Would it be appropriate to write an ncurses (do people still use
> ncurses?) client that uses pactl as a backend?  maybe something more
> integrated would be desirable.

If an ncurses interface was written, please use libpulse and not a
command line wrapper around pactl... it'll be far easier anyway :p

>>> 'pavucontrol' works from a local terminal but doesn't seem to work when
>>> logged in remotely- I get a gnome dialog [so it's not an X problem]
>>> saying
>>> 'connection refused'
>>
>> I don't know off-hand what's wrong. What's the setup? So far I know that
>> you have a server and a client, and X is running on the client, and you
>> are trying to run pavucontrol on the server.
> 
> The only client-server relationship is in X.  I was expecting to control
> the remote machine's volume control using a dialog that would appear on
> the local machine's display: classic X11 forwarding.

Ahh but Pulse piggy backs on to the X11 protocol so that if you ssh to a
remote machine and run an app, you will get both the display and the
audio that app produces on your *local* machine.

I guess your expectation is understandable, but by the same token, more
people prefer things to work seemlessly.

If you want to know more about how this process works, see here:
http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/08/sound-on-linux-is-confusing-defuzzing-part-2-pulseaudio/

You can always ensure that you run "pax11publish -r" first and that way
a remote PA daemon will be used instead.

> But this is not important or desirable to me anymore since I suspect I
> can accomplish my task using pactl.

Bear in mind that even if you do ssh to a remote machine, if the X11
properties on the root window are set as they are by default, then pactl
will control the PA deamon on your local machine via the network
protocol. pacmd will likely not work as it uses a different interface.
If you read and understand the above article, this should make sense :)

Col

-- 

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

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