Pulseaudio

[Nigel Henry]

On Sunday 13 January 2008 17:03, Karl Larsen wrote:
>     Pulseaudio is an interesting old way to allow audio to be carried or
> duplicated and perhaps other useful things. I am an Electrical Engineer
> and studied the idea of mixing a lot of audio signals on a high
> frequency. This is what Mr.Lennart Poettering  is trying to do with what
> he calls Pulseaudio. I don't know just how it is done but it does work.
>
>     I got Pulseaudio working on my Fedora 8 operating system and it
> appeared to be working properly, but I didn't know enough about it to
> test many features. But I did discover that two non-Fedora applications
> called Skype and gMFSK will not function with Pulseaudio in operation.
>
>     This problem I ask Lennart at Pulseaudio and he said this:
>
> On Thu, 10.01.08 09:13, Karl Larsen (k5di at zianet.com) wrote:
>  > >     I got pulseaudio working on F8 and the normal audio on movies and
>  > > such is fine. But I tried gMFSK which is an application that uses the
>  > > sound-card DSP engine. It looks fine but when I try to receive digital
>  > > data it suffers very bad interference and it will not transmit because
>  > > it says /dev/dsp is busy.
>
> gMFSK seems to be a program that uses OSS (/dev/dsp) directly. For
> those you have two options:
>
> 1) Use "padsp" to redirect it to PA. Just prefix your application call
>    with "padsp".
>
> 2) Use "pasuspender" to temporarily tell PA to give up access to the
>    audio device. This is probably the better way to fix this if you
>    need lowest-possible latencies. (I am not sure if you need those,
>    but I assume so, given this seems to be some modem sw?)
>
>  > >     Sype comes up fine and appears to receive data but when I try to
>  > > call anyone or answer a call they can't hear me at all, and all I hear
>  > > is noise.
>
> Skype is closed source software. It's very difficult to get this
> working out of the box for you, due to its nature.
>
> http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup#Skype
>
> Lennart
>
> -- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
> ICQ# 11060553 http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4
> _______________________________________________ pulseaudio-discuss
> mailing list
>
>     I did both things and neither got my gMFSK or Skype working. There
> is more to this than I have knowledge of.
>
>
>     This problem caused me to delete all the pulseaudio from my F8
> computer with yum remove *pulseaudio" which was a huge list! I did it
> and nothing worked on the F8 system after that. I had to re-load F8 and
> it came up working fine. But now, after removing the pulseaudio software
> I cannot yum vlc from livna any more.
>
>     Pulseaudio is a big error in my opinion. It does nothing a normal
> user of Fedora wants but raises all kinds of issues with other software.
> I really think Fedora needs to leave Pulseaudio off it's systems.
>
> Karl

Hi Karl. Good evening (as it is in northern france).

It's never a good idea when Yum or Apt wants to remove half the operating 
system to just say yes, when you want to remove a package.

All you need to remove in the case of pulseaudio is the package 
"alsa-plugins-pulseaudio". If you are using KDE, this should also remove the 
KDE stuff for pulseaudio. I see that you are using VLC, and that uses SDL 
stuff, so you also need to add a line to /home/user/.bashrc, as below.
unset SDL_AUDIODRIVER. Adding that line doesn't appear to affect playing DVD's 
though, as my DVD's play fine without that line.

I'll come back to the libx264 problems on your "updates" thread.

Al the best, and keep on trucking.

Nigel.