Comments on: So how does the KDE PulseAudio support work anyway?

By: Colin

Colin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:10:53 +0000

Hi Peter – My recent posts are indeed now listed on planetkde so it should be more exposed. The main work is heading for 4.4 release and some upcoming changes to kmix should also make it into kde 4.5

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 11:25:31 +0000

Hi, I only found your blog post(s) through many clicks via bugtracker of pulseaudio (http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/706), then searching google for the module-device-manager. These posts really should get listed on planetkde, I am shure I am not the only one who is excited about this. I would be so happy, if sound plug&play would work for all apps (via pulse-alsa-emulation) in kde and could be controlled from there. Also the priority-list is exactly what I need. Hope to see this in kde-4.4.

By: Mandriva 2010.0 is out!! « Colin.Guthr.ie

Mandriva 2010.0 is out!! « Colin.Guthr.ie — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:06:06 +0000

[...] have put in a lot of work this time round. I’m pretty happy with the PulseAudio->Phonon integration work I did which builds on our previous approaches which were not quite as functional (although did at [...]

By: Colin

Colin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:40:21 +0000

This is certainly true in the past and while Ubuntu are still doing some things a bit differently for no real reason, the guys involved are much more active with us upstream and are certainly providing a much better PulseAudio experience these days. So while Lennart is right in his comments, it’s not really as bad as it could be

By: Anon

Anon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:23:15 +0000

*buntu is the wrong system to try out PulseAudio on anyway, see the PA developer’s blog at http://0pointer.de/blog
Looks like very bad management on Ubuntu’s part there.

By: Colin

Colin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:37:42 +0000

Hi,

Both the Xine and GStreamer backends work with this patchset in the same way. Sadly the xine-pulse output layer itself is not particularly great in my experience. We ship GStreamer by default so my focus has not been on improving that side of things. I’m quietly hoping that the Xine backend will disappear and be replaced by either GStreamer (if it gets a bit more love) or VLC etc. Having spoken to the guy who wrote the xine-pulse output layer, I believe there is not much flexibility in the API at their end. That said, I’m all for getting PA more widely adopted and if I do find time to take a look at that weak link in the chain, I certainly will.

As for getting into 4.4 I’m not sure of the time constraints there. I am waiting for a Qt code review of the phonon changes prior to officially landing it and we should really push an offical PulseAudio 0.9.20 release too to ensure that module-device-manager is available officially without patching.

That said, you are more than welcome to poke the relevant people in your distro of choice and point out this work. I’d happily discuss with the people who do the integration work any issues or questions they may have.

Hope this helps

By: Colin

Colin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:33:02 +0000

Well Esben (along with many others) has taken the “quick” way out. There is nothing wrong with that and I don’t want to say this is “wrong” etc., but the evidence is simply not there to say “PulseAudio sucks”. Configuring and deploying PA is a complex process. Many proplems with the low level drivers have been fixed very recently and with upgrades old user preferences can get in the way of a working system. With phonon especially, integration with PA is lacking which can often lead to configuration problems that cause things to go silent. When this happens it’s usually not too difficult to work out what is wrong and fix the configuration, but the easiest way is to obviously disable PA and the old configuration probably starts working again. This in no way reflects on PA itself, merely the user configuration and the ease with which the distro in question deals with that. Hope that makes sense!

As for the patches, I’m not aware of other distros using this patchset yet, but they are obviously most welcome to do so (no one has asked me any questions so it could be that they are using it and it “just works” but that’s probably a bit unlikely!!). I’m very much working with upstream to get these patches committed officially but we will need to wait until PulseAudio 0.9.20 is released before we can do that as it contains the necessary support for this (in Mandriva I backport the support to PA 0.9.19).

By: Tweets that mention So how does the KDE PulseAudio support work anyway? « Colin.Guthr.ie -- Topsy.com

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 06:39:56 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by PostRank – Linux, FOSSwiki. FOSSwiki said: Colin Guthrie (coling): So how does the KDE PulseAudio sup… http://bit.ly/yUIf6 #postrank #opensource http://bit.ly/D1aRp [...]

By: ritti

ritti — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:36:57 +0000

So I see by Esben that PulseAudio still sucks. In Kubuntu 9.04 all I saw was repeated random threading-related crashes handling only 2 sound cards. I’m in no hurry to try PulseAudio in 9.10 either, as I doubt it ever gets better (it’s a shame too, I’d like to use it). Yeah I guess I’m glad PulseAudio will get a phonon backend but Esben, I personally would be more glad PulseAudio actually worked properly haha.

So this PulseAudio phonon is not in standard KDE but only Mandriva then?

By: Jonas

Jonas — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:22:49 +0000

Nice to see work being done here. Two questions though.

1. Since the backends need to be aware of PA, what are their current status regarding that? Especially Xine I suppose since I at least never have had much luck with the gstreamer one.

2. Any hope for this to become a part of KDE 4.4? I have no intention of switching distro just for this…