Sound problem,

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi Billy,

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 05:12, Billie Erin Walsh <bilwalsh at swbell.net> wrote:
> Steven Vollom wrote:
>> On Wednesday 03 June 2009 06:06:11 pm Billie Erin Walsh wrote:
>>
> As before, Kubuntu 9.04-64/KDE4.2.2.
>
> I only have the onboard sound. ATI. [ looked at it a hundred times and
> didn't see it ] I had to get rid of phonon to get the card to work at
> all. Pulseaudio is still there but not set as default. I can't seem to
> get rid of it.

Getting rid of Phonon was probably not the best thing to do, Phonon
being one of the basic elements of KDE4.

Having an ATI on board card myself and ran in quite some trouble with
the sound, I found the following solution.

1. Remove and purge Pulseaudio. Again, neither KDE4 nor any of it's
applications is designed to use Pulseaudio, it's the underlying Ubuntu
system that unfortunately drags in Pulseaudio and causes problems.
2. Make sure the default sound backend, phonon-backend-xine is
installed. Install the necessary codecs if needed, but avoid the
libxine1-all-plugins, libxine1 and  libxine1-misc-plugins
metapackages, those will drag Pulseaudio in again :( If those are
already installed, don't even try to remove them, they will try to
remove all KDE...so much for hard-coded dependencies.
3. Remove the ~/.kde/share/config/phonondevicesrc to remove all
erroneous entries made by Pulseaudio. In my case Pulseaudio even
removed my sound card altogether, no idea how it was going to play any
sound without at least some sound hardware...
4. Remove, if existing, the ~/.asound.conf file as it its not
necessary to use Alsa, Phonon can handle this very well.
5. Restartt KDE4, and voila, sound works fine.
>
> I guess the problem seems to be with sites like youtube. Do they use
> "flash"?

Yes, of course, but there is an effort under way to implement the
HTML5 specifications which will allow to play media without having to
rely on flash altogether. A pity this effort is being done only now...

There are remaining glitches with flash on my 64-bit system and
Firefox every now and then looses the sound and begins to make
stuttering noises. But I found out that YouTube runs quite well with
Konqueror, and flash audio (for sites like thesixtyone.com) is handled
best with Opera 10 beta.

All my KDE4 applications play sound nicely now and I should not be
bothered by Pulseaudio for some time, just hoping it doesn't pop in
again with Karmic Koala the day I decide to switch.


Regards, Myriam.

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