Upgrade to Edgy causes much laptop grief: sound and video format hell.

Wed Feb 7 11:49:37 UTC 2007

I had my laptop working pretty well under Dapper.  I decided, after
months of watching and waiting, that perhaps now Edgy, with all fixes,
etc. in the repos, was likely to not cause trouble for me.

I backed up my system, popped in my Edgy disk and did a complete install
from the ground up.  (I had tried an upgrade, but it didn't like
something I did in the past and vomited as a result.)  Now my laptop is
in a shambles.

First, of course, the bug with my laptop's sound card and video card
hasn't been touched.  This is no surprise.  So I hand-edited my
xorg.conf file to add the appropriate driver and gave up on the internal
sound card again.  After all I still have my external sound card, right?

Wrong.

Apparently there's been a regression in the USB Sound Blaster support.
And it's a particularly strange one.  Rhythmbox (and only Rhythmbox) can
play sound out the external sound card.  Absolutely nothing else can.  I
don't get the startup sound, the login sound, the logout sound, sound
events from GAIM, etc. etc. etc.  Oh, and this only if I go into
System->Preferences->Sound and switch it from "Autodetect" (or "ALSA"
under Sound Capture) to "USB Audio" on the Devices tab.  Oh, and I get
the test tones from "Sound Playback" on the Sound Events, Music and
Movies and Audio Conferencing sections.  Again only if I specify "USB
Audio", though.  Sound Capture, no matter what the setting, generates
this error: "gconfaudiosrc ! audioconvert ! audioresample !
gconfaudiosink profile=chat: Could not open resource for writing."  The
rest, when "Autodetect" is set, generate this instead: "audiotestsrc
wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink:
Could not open resource for writing."

So I can listen to music, but I can't do much else.  (Like, it seems,
listen to the audio in movies.  But more on that below.)

Now something odd shows up that I only caught by accident.  When I run a
GNOME app in a shell, say gedit, I get some pretty bizarre verbiage: 

$ gedit
ALSA lib confmisc.c:670:(snd_func_card_driver) cannot find card '0'
ALSA lib conf.c:3479:(_snd_config_evaluate) function
snd_func_card_driver returned error: No such device
ALSA lib confmisc.c:391:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:3479:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat
returned error: No such device
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1070:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:3479:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer
returned error: No such device
ALSA lib conf.c:3947:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such device
ALSA lib pcm.c:2146:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default

I found this by accident.  I'm sure that the system is trying to tell me
something, but I can't make heads nor tails of it.  It seems to be
trying to open "card 0" and not finding it.  This is no surprise since
there is no card0 in /proc/asound.  It's called card1 there for some
reason.  

$ ll
total 1.0K
dr-xr-xr-x 4 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 card1/
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 cards
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 devices
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 hwdep
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 modules
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 2007-02-07 19:42 MP3 -> card1/
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 oss/
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 pcm
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 seq/
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 timers
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 version

$ cat cards
 1 [MP3            ]: USB-Audio - Sound Blaster MP3+
                      Creative Labs Sound Blaster MP3+ at
usb-0000:00:03.3-7.1, full speed

I'm guessing that this is why audio is so unstable for me.  How would I
go about getting ALSA to look at card 1 or rename card 1 to card 0?

This leaves me with my final problem.  I have a lot of AVIs encoded in,
it turns out, DivX5 format.  I've downloaded all the gstreamer packages
from main,restricted,universe,multiverse and I've downloaded the Win32
codecs and have them installed.  Not a single one of my video
applications can read the files, however.  This despite the fact that I
was watching those very same files under Dapper only two or three nights
ago.  Which of the codec packages did I miss and where would I go
looking for it/them?  (I did a google on "DivX 5 Ubuntu" and on "Xvid
codec Ubuntu" but got nothing heartening.  A lot of "we do not support
this"-style messages or pointers to codecs I already have installed.
And I know that this was supported not all that long ago given that I,
as I said, used to watch these movies.)

So I'm stuck here with two outstanding questions:
1. How do I get ALSA to look in the right place, or to name the USB card
properly?
2. How do I get my DivX5-encoded movies working under Ubuntu?
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