No sound in Kubuntu 11.04

[Duncan]

Marcelo Magno T. Sales posted on Wed, 25 May 2011 21:14:00 -0300 as
excerpted:

> Thanks for your reply. I have the phonon-gstreamer backend installed,
> but will try phonon-vlc as you have suggested. After a few days I'll
> post the results (got to give some time to be sure sound will not fail
> again, sometimes it lasts for a few days before failing).

Do try it, but FWIW, I have a bit of new information.

Upon updating my Gentoo installation yesterday, there was a change in 
phonon's default USE flags, switching the default backend to phonon-
gstreamer from I believe phonon-vlc.  Needless to say I kept the vlc 
backend as I don't even have gstreamer installed and don't want it 
installed. (In Gentoo, such options are controlled by USE flags set at the 
time the package is built, normally by the user since Gentoo is a scripted-
from-source distribution, so keeping vlc simply meant overriding the USE 
flag defaults by setting the ones I wanted.)

But the important bit, the new information, is that according to the gentoo 
package scripts changelog, from phonon 4.5.0, upstream kde is defaulting 
to the phonon-gstreamer backend.

As I said in my original reply, that blog I read was about a year ago.  
It's possible they now favor the gstreamer backend now, thus making it the 
default, or it may simply be bowing to the the fact that so many 
distributions default to gnome and thus to gstreamer already.  I don't 
know.

But, what I DO know for sure is my own experience, that the phonon-xine 
backend kept giving me messages about disappearing devices even tho it's 
the device on the mobo, and no, I did NOT change the BIOS to disable it, 
and that all those problems disappeared when I switched to phonon-vlc.  As 
I said I've never tried the phonon-gstreamer backend, and wasn't even 
aware that it had the disappearing devices problem too, but with luck, 
switching to phonon-vlc will cure the issue for you as well.

Please do follow up when you're sure whether it's cured the problem or 
not, as I really am curious, especially now that I know you're using 
gstreamer AND know it's the kde default now.  As I said, I wasn't aware 
that the gstreamer backend had the problem too -- maybe it's just luck 
that the vlc backend works so much better for me?

The other possibility of course is that it's version-dependent.  Maybe 
phonon-gstreamer only matured with phonon 4.5, and perhaps you're running 
an earlier version?

But in any case it's worth giving the phonon-vlc backend a try, since it 
did cure the problems I was having.  If it doesn't work any better, you 
can always try something else.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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