[pulseaudio-discuss] Audio lag with bluetooth audio

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 20:57 +0100, Malte Gell wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I have connected a Jabra Halo bluetooth headset/headphone to an openSUSE
> 12.3 machine.
> 
> When I try to watch DVB with kaffeine audio lags terribly and after some
> minutes, sometimes after seconds audio stops completely. I have to quit
> kaffeine and start it again. After minutes the same sht happens again.
> 
> In var log messages I can see these errors:
> 
> [bluetooth] module-bluetooth-device.c: Skipping 154301 us (= 27216
> bytes) in audio stream
> 
> daemon.conf client.conf and default.pa is nearly 100% the default values.
> 
> /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf has these entries:
> 
> [General]
> Enable=Sink,Control,Headset,Gateway,Source,Media
> Disable=Socket
> Master=true
> AutoConnect=true
> 
> [Headset]
> # HFP=false
> HFP=true
> MaxConnections=10
> 
> [A2DP]
> #Disable=Socket
> SBCSources=1
> MPEG12Sources=0
> 
> Where and how can I start to debug this issue?

You could try playing audio with paplay at the same time with kaffeine.
If paplay works but kaffeine doesn't, then there's something wrong with
the interaction between pulseaudio and kaffeine.

If paplay doesn't work any better, then I don't have any better ideas
than to try to understand how module-bluez4-device.c works and then try
to find something to improve there. And if pulseaudio is working
perfectly, see if the kernel could be improved...

Note that pulseaudio doesn't have proper latency information with
Bluetooth devices, so getting good A/V sync is dependent on luck. It's
possible to tweak the latency offset with e.g. pavucontrol, you might
want to try that.

Of course, if you lose the audio completely, that's a bigger problem
that should never happen, so there's a bug somewhere. The bug could be
in kaffeine, pulseaudio, kernel or the headset itself.

> I have these packages installed:
> 
> pulseaudio-module-bluetooth-4.99.3-1.1.x86_64
> pulseaudio-utils-4.99.3-1.1.x86_64
> pulseaudio-module-zeroconf-4.99.3-1.1.x86_64
> pulseaudio-module-gconf-4.99.3-1.1.x86_64
> pulseaudio-4.99.3-1.1.x86_64
> pulseaudio-module-x11-4.99.3-1.1.x86_64
> bluez-4.101-7.2.1.x86_64
> 
> Thanks for any helpful hint

There's a mismatch between the installed pulseaudio version and the log
message. Version 4.99.3 doesn't have file called
module-bluetooth-device.c, so the log message is from an older version
of pulseaudio. This is probably not important, however, if you're having
the same problems with 4.99.3 too...

-- 
Tanu