[pulseaudio-discuss] Multimedia that *just works*, pretty please!

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hello Gene,

Am Sonntag, 20. September 2015, 11:39:59 CEST schrieb Gene Heskett:
> On Sunday 20 September 2015 09:37:55 Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> > Please reply only to one list if you reply – even though I think its
> > high time that people work together for a grander, unified view on how
> > to handle multimedia within Linux. As I am not subscribe to
> > alsa-devel, please Cc me in case you reply to this list.
> > 
> > And yes, this is a rant. But it based a huge lot of real life
> > experiences with multimedia on Linux just not working right for me and
> > various machines I use for myself or installed for others.
> > 
> > While I appreciate that it may just work okay for quite some people, I
> > also think no amount of denial will make the cases where it currently
> > breaks like it breaks for me on various machines go away. Am I the
> > only one? I don´t know, but I do not think so.
> 
> Hi yourself, Martin.  I'll snip the rant because everybody has suffered
> thru reading it 3+ times now, but I am in violent agreement with your
> opinion.

I hope I manage to turn it into something more constructive. I like to see it 
as an opportunity to improve things, but I am unsure on how to effectively 
help doing that.

Actually I would be willing to work through to make a certain setup work and 
report and follow-through all bugs I encounter with it. But I am not even sure 
what the recommended setup for me would be.

I gathered as much that it would use PulseAudio. But would it use the Phonon 
Gstreamer or the VLC backend?

> However I don't think it entirely  pulseaudio's fault, more likely some

I think it does not help to think in the terms of whom´s fault it is. I think 
its no one´s fault and its important to keep any personal attacks out of this. 
Although I cannot prove it, I think its the combination of components that 
does not work. 

At KDE Randa Meetings I talked with Harald and he said both ALSA and 
Pulseaudio have quirks they need to work-around. And they only officially 
support Pulseaudio while still giving the choice to use ALSA directly. But 
that doesn´t mean that Phonon may not have its own share of issues.

The thing for me is: Where do I search for the root cause of the issue? And 
what if the issue is not caused by a single component but by the interaction 
of several components?

Having a broader view at the whole audio stack could help to find out what to 
fix where to make all the components work nicely together. Or to see where to 
even remove a component. As far as I am aware Phonon and Pulseaudio have some 
functional overlap. Phonon implemented things for ALSA, like automatic audio 
output switching that Pulseaudio already provides for example. It is from a 
time, where KDE developers didn´t want to depend on a single framework and be 
flexible, in case there would be issues with gstreamer, VLC or at some time 
mplayer backends. But in the end it also raised complexity. I bet GNOME goes 
directly to PulseAudio and may work better.

> idiot web page designers poor coding.  If a way to insulate us from
> their poor coding could be found I believe that would fix 75% of the
> problems. I have long since lost track of the number of times I have
> lost sound in the middle of my nightly tour of the news sites etc, only
> to have them fixed by finding an idle shell and doing an
> alsactl --restore.

I tried "alsactl restore", but for the system where Amarok still doesn´t play 
it does not help. Clementine plays there, so in this case, I bet the issue is 
up higher in the stack. For today I won´t spend any more time on it. 
Clementine plays, so it will do it.

Ciao,
-- 
Martin