[mythtv-users] Necessary to remove pulseaudio?

Jean-Yves Avenard jyavenard at gmail.com
Sun Jan 8 09:15:53 UTC 2012


On 3 January 2012 11:20, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
> MythTV can use PulseAudio, but the current implementation is restricted to
> 2-channel audio.

not at all.

MythTV will use whatever number of channels Pulse reports.
>  Go into the audio setup and scan for devices.  It will
> enumerate anything PulseAudio exposes, then disable PulseAudio, and
> enumerate anything on the underlying ALSA.  The best option is to just not
> fiddle with anything, and let MythTV disable PulseAudio during playback so
> it can use ALSA directly.  You can instead use the emulated ALSA:pulse
> device, or the native PulseAudio device, however both have been known to
> cause loss of A/V sync and other squirrely problems in the past.
>

I should add that there's really no reason to uninstall pulse ; as
Warner stated, if you configure myth to use ALSA, then pulse will be
automatically disabled.

The main issue I see with Pulse is that when using pulse, from time to
time you get white noise. This can be fixed by changing the default
resampling rate. I'm 100% sure the issue is with pulse, as I can
reproduce the problem using pulse OSS emulation. However, for some
reason using the ALSA emulation (device ALSA:pulse), I've never
experienced it.

The only advantage I see of using the native pulse audio output in
myth, is that you can separately control the volume of the myth
application.

Having said that, I suggest people using the ALSA emulation if they
want to use pulse...

If your machine is a dedicated htpc, I can't think of much reason for
not using ALSA natively. Quality will be better, digital audio is
supported etc..


> the duration of playback.  At the end of playback when MythTV resumes Pulse,
> all that buffered noise from other applications comes flooding in.  I don't
> know off hand what would be causing that.

Never heard of that problem before, never seen it myself either.


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