[mythtv-users] Honey, I broke the audio...

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Mon Nov 11 01:22:46 UTC 2013


For the first time in, maybe, 9 years of running MythTV, I've had major
audio trouble, and I can't figure out how to fix it.

Some time last week, something went bump in the night, and suddenly, Myth 
0.26, which is running on SuSE 12.1 over Pulse over ALSA suddenly had no
volume control.  No joke: woke the sister up in the middle of the night,
blaring at full volume on the next entry of a snooze playlist, and while
the volume buttons would adjust the thermometer, the volume stayed at Max.

After great effort in the dark, she found a way to get it to cooperate,
which may have been switching Mixer to Software -- or maybe I did that.

But nothing we picked in FE audio setup would drive the ALSA mixer from
the Myth volume knob -- though manually controlling the mixer worked
fine.

I strongly suspect that YoU autoupdated something that broke ALSA.

So anyway, I was working on it tonight, and tried, as a first step, 
uninstalling Pulse.

That didn't do much (including, as it turned out, stopping the running
PA server), and I went back in and looked at Yast again, to find that it
hadn't uninstalled the libraries.

So I uninstalled the 4 libraries.

And it promptly uninstalled about 96 things before I aborted it.  

Including Myth.

<sigh>

So, the outcome is that even after reinstalling all the relevant parts
of Pulse and rebooting, I still can't get any test audio out of the FE 
at all, and I can't see the ALSA physical devices in the output select
menu,

Even though Alsamixer can see everything it's always been able to show 
me, and adjust them.

Part of this is the whole PulseAudio thing -- and is anyone interested
in taking a contract on Lennart Poettering? -- but part of it is that
I don't really know where Myth is most comfortable these days; the page
on the wiki that talks about digital audio admits to being out of date,
and doesn't really recommend anything better.

Could someone give me a pointer to what the preferred underlying 
Linux audio setup is for Myth these days?   Before Pam kills me?
I'd be happy to move up to .27, but the only thing Packman appears 
to have packaged of .27 is mythweb.

Cheers,
-- jra

-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274


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