[kde-freebsd] Sound issues with a fresh installation

[David Naylor]

Hi list,

I recently did a clean installation of KDE however sound did not work.  The 
details follow.  

Fix:

To fix the issue I did the following:
# pkg delete -f phonon-gstreamer
# pkg install phonon-vlc

Note:

If a command like `ogg123` or a application like `vlc` does not work then your 
problem is not with KDE but with a lower level on the FreeBSD sound stack.  

Explanation:

Initially gstreamer comes installed with two sinks: pulseaudio and oss.  
However, pulseaudio does not work and that is selected as the default sink by 
autoaudiosink.  Uninstalling the gstreamer pulseaudio packages fixes this 
issue.  

GStreamer was then capable of actually playing audio (see [1] for the command 
to use).  The issue was phonon-gstreamer was not working itself.  My attempts 
to debug phonon haven't yielded any clues [1].  

I then tried to use a different phonon backend by installing the vlc and xine 
backend however KDE did not honour my ordering of preferred backends (even 
after a logout/login).  The only way I could get phonon to use vlc was to make 
it the only option.  

Questions:

 - Can anyone else verify:
  - phonon-gstreamer failes to play audio?
  - phonon fails to honour backend preference?
  - audio does not work out of the box?  
 - Any hints on getting gstreamer to work?  
 - Is this a new development (I think the latest update [2] caused this 
issue)?  

Please note that sound via OSS worked out of the box.  

Regards,

[1] https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Debugging/Phonon
[2] All the above is on a "binary only" system by installing (and updating) 
from the pkgng repository.  
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