Problems with totem (both -xine and -gstreamer) with pulseaudio (frame drops/popping audio)

[Michael R. Head]

I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this problem. I've seen it for a
while now and had hoped it would silently disappear.


I have a (large) number of xvid videos that I watch on a few machine
running 8.04LTS with all the latest updates. When watching these videos
with totem, using either -gstreamer or -xine, using pulseaudio for
playback, I experience period frame drops (with totem-gstreamer) or
audible pops (with totem-xine).

It's almost as if the video stream and audio stream are slightly off and
totem occasionally fixes this by either dropping a video frame or
stopping the audio momentarily.

I can workaround this problem a couple of ways:
1) use mplayer (with pulseaudio). This works perfectly, but I dislike
mplayer's interface
2) killall pulseaudio, let alsa directly control the audio hardware,
configure gstreamer to directly use alsa, and play the files with
totem-gstreamer.

Either way, no glitch. When I turn pulseaudio back on, switch gstreamer
to use the pulseaudio backend, and play the files again, I lose frames
again.

I like pulseaudio and would prefer to keep it running, but this is
really annoying. I haven't found any bug reports matching this, which is
surprising to me because this bug affects me on a daily basis on
multiple machines.

-- 
Michael R. Head <burner at suppressingfire.org>
http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~mike/
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