Sound problem,

[O. Sinclair]

Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
> 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.
A related question: are you a Skype user and if so, how does it "play" 
with Phonon? Asking as I have users on 3.5.10 and the day will come when 
we go KDE4 and if Skype does not work some people will be mighty unhappy.

Regards,
Sinclair