[pulseaudio-discuss] Pavucontrol level meter bug (at least on "Input Devices")

[Maarten Bosmans]

2011/8/4 Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie>:
> 'Twas brillig, and David Henningsson at 04/08/11 14:21 did gyre and gimble:
>> Ok, while testing 0.99.1 I seem to have found a bug in the pavucontrol
>> level meter. Go to the "input devices" tab and notice that the fact that
>> this tab is open, is not enough to keep the stream alive. E g, start
>> gnome-volume-control and check the level meter there, it works, and now
>> the pavucontrol level meter works as well, but as soon as you close
>> gnome-volume-control (or at least a few seconds after), the recording
>> stream goes to idle and the level meter stops.
>
> This is a feature.... we use the DONT_INHIBIT_SUSPEND flag.

The flag was added in a patch by me after a discussion "Make
discoverable PA network sound devices available locally results in
huge network traffic" on the ml, in Januari.

> I remember at some point someone complained that pavucontrol kept the
> device open when it shouldn't - can't remember the exact scenario now
> but there were cases when this was a total pain before.

The scenerio was that having pavucontrol open on a host with tunnels
to another host (e.g. 'make available' checked in paprefs) caused a
lot of network traffic, even if there was no audio playing through the
tunnels.

> So it's easily "fixed" but I'm not sure we should... but then if memory
> serves the complaint was about keeping sinks open (for monitors)...
> keeping the mic open for the vu is probably a good idea as there is
> usually some degree of background noise etc. and users shouting "test"...

So probably my patch was a bit to broad. You can look into enabling
DONT_INHIBIT_AUTO_SUSPEND more intelligently for different
monitors/sources. Also, it seems that g-v-c can use the flag too at
some places.

Maarten