[mythtv-users] Necessary to remove pulseaudio?

R. G. Newbury newbury at mandamus.org
Tue Jan 3 16:18:25 UTC 2012


On 01/03/2012 10:53 AM, steve wrote:
> On 1/2/2012 7:18 PM, R. G. Newbury wrote:
>> On 01/02/2012 06:45 PM, steve wrote:
>>> I have been trying to resolve stuttering issues with sound from hd
>>> recordings (via HDPVR). I recalled reading that PulseAudio (PA) has been
>>> known to cause problems with MythTV, so I uninstalled it. My sound went
>>> away completely. So I reinstalled it and the sound came back (plus
>>> stuttering).
>>>
>>> Consulting a couple of wiki pages about this, I find contradictory
>>> statements. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Configuring_Digital_Sound says PA
>>> is "not supported by MythTV" and "For MythTV installations it is
>>> advisable to turn off any sound servers that sit on top of ALSA such as
>>> Pulse Audio or the KDE or Gnome sound servers."
>>>
>>> OTOH http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Installing_MythTV_on_Fedora#Sound_setup
>>> says "MythTV does work with Pulseaudio, however, if you wish to remove
>>> it, you can run the following command to revert to using ALSA only. yum
>>> remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio." When I run that command, yum says it's
>>> available but not installed.
>>>
>>> So my questions are:
>>>
>>> (1) Can MythTV coexist with PA or not? My video playback is configured
>>> to use ALSA:default, but it must be using PA in some way since
>>> uninstalling it broke the sound.
>>>
>>> (2) Could PA be the source of audio stuttering on playback? Latest
>>> description of symptoms is here *http://tinyurl.com/76s2nqs* (shortened
>>> Gossamer threads url)
>>>
>>> (3) If PA can't coexist with MythTV, what is the proper procedure for
>>> getting rid of it? Per the digital sound wiki, do I also have to disable
>>> the KDE sound server, and if so how is that done?
>>>
>> I've been using:
>> yum remove pulseaudio  \
>>            pavucontrol pulseaudio-utils pulseaudio-libs-zeroconf \
>>            gstreamer-plugins-pulse pulseaudio-core-libs \
>>            pulseaudio-libs-devel pulseaudio-module-zeroconf \
>>           pulseaudio-gdm-hooks pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
>>
>> This leaves pulse-audio-libs, which I think is plugged in deeply into
>> the sound processing structure.
>>
>> Make sure that you have all of the mixer settings set full 'ON' when you
>> test audio. It is really annoying to finally find out that the sound was
>> just turned down. Been there. No T-shirt. I use alsamixer-gui and then
>> aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav to test.
>>
>> Geoff
>
> Thanks, but according to previous post by Raymond, MythTV frontend
> disables Pulse.  So is this necessary?

To be frank, I am no longer sure. It *used* to be, back about Fedora 8 
or so, when pulseaudio was a horrendous mess. I read much less about the 
sorts of things it did not do then, so it may well be a 'good boy' now.
I'm still running on inertia....or *tradition*, as I like to call it!

Geoff









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