[pulseaudio-discuss] set media.role for VMware client

[Sean Greenslade]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 10:38:31PM +0100, sben1783 wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm using VMware Horizon client from kubuntu to work on my companies windows
> machine. My idea was to play some music from my own machine while doing
> monkey work within VMware. I was very happy to read about the "cork"
> mechanism in order to mute that music as soon as I get a business call or am
> attending an online meeting within VMware. Unfortunately, I haven't been
> able to figure out how to set the "media.role" for the VMware binary. I see,
> f.ex., that vlc has media.role=video, but the VMware client doesn't have
> any. I tried to set it via a .desktop file, but that fails - probably
> because the VMware application I start (vmware-view) spawns some other
> binary and the media.role property is not passed on to the child process?

I think using the .desktop file is probably your best bet (though I
haven't tried it myself; this is just from a quick scan of the PA code).
You can see specifically which binary has spawned the pulseaudio
connection by running the command "pacmd list-sink-inputs" and looking
at the application.process.binary attribute. If that isn't specific
enough, you can use application.process.id to get the PID, then check it
like so:

$ stat /proc/<FOUND PID>/exe

Which returns something like:
  File: /proc/1581/exe -> /usr/bin/mplayer

--Sean