Phonon problems in Debian

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Allan Sandfeld Jensen at 17/01/11 19:12 did gyre and
gimble:
> On Sunday 16 January 2011, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> 
>> Regardless of how you feel about PA, I don't think anyone has complained
>> about this tidy up!
> 
> I've never used it, but the list is a complete mess on my system. I
> currently have six entries, which is the same two outputs duplicated 3
> times using different name schemes.

Yeah this isn't really surprising.

>> AFAICT the device detection stuff is done via a phonon "platform plugin"
>> it is this plugin that actually talks to Solid and (I think) uses
>> libkaudiodevice. I didn't personally look at this much because (as I
>> said above) I totally bypass the platform plugins when PA is used,
>> avoiding all the resulting issues therein!
>>
> 
> How do you detect if PA is used?

I just attempt to connect to the PulseAudio daemon. If I get a
connection it's there, and if not, it's not. It's quite simple really.

>> No this is just the device list. The "backend" itself is one of
>> GStreamer, VLC or Xine (but Xine is more or less dead these days).
>
>
> Interesting. I have been unable to use Phonon for video for a few
> months, but it started working again yesterday after I deleted the
> Gstreamer and VLC backends (the backend selector is blank and apparently
> not working). GStreamer has been able to play some few audio files, but
> no video, and VLC consistantly crashes when used (this is on debian
> using the official VLC and GStreamer packages). Forcing Xine to be used
> by completely removing alternatives seem to make video work again and
> also made it possible to play non-MP3 audio files again, both of which
> didn't work with GStreamer. This might be Debian specific issues, but I
> am not feeling too great about t he status of Phonon.

Well packaging is an issue. GStreamer stuff is generally shipped in
separate packages for different codecs etc. so you'd have to install the
relevant bits and bobs. I can assure you that I use GStreamer for video
and audio playback of lots of different formats. I suspect you just
needed to install some extra GStreamer packages.

Xine is pretty much dead these days and has a lot of nuanced bugs that
are not really solvable without upstream involvement and that's not
really happening seeing as the upstream project isn't really going anywhere.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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