[mythtv-users] xbmc killed my sound

Willy Boyd willyboyd at gmail.com
Mon Oct 13 16:57:20 UTC 2008


On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 9:14 PM, Brad DerManouelian
<myth at dermanouelian.com>wrote:

>
> Yeah, I've been through all this stuff over the past 3 years with mythtv,
> but this was my first ubuntu no sound experience and couldn't fix it. I
> found a post on the ubuntu forums from August where someone had the exact
> same problem I did (xbmc, then no sound). He ended up reinstalling ubuntu -
> and it happened again to him. So I've decided to just reinstall and not try
> xbmc again. :)
>
> -Brad
>
>
>
I ran into this problem too and was able to lick it.  Not that I expect this
to change any minds (I'm certainly of the mind to ditch something when it
burns me really bad), but for anyone else it happens to:

This seems to be some combination of a problem between Ubuntu, and,
_possibly_ XBMC.  I found a lot of information on the net regarding this
issue that seemed to predate or at least not involve XBMC at all.

The /etc/init.d/alsa-utils init script in Ubuntu does a whole lot of "stuff"
to save/restore the ALSA sound state.  Looks like quite more than Fedora
ever did back when I used it.  Somehow an app crash makes one of the sound
output connections "go away" (in my case it was spdif), and then this script
stores / then restores said broken state on reboot.  The workaround is to
move that script out of the way for the next reboot (sudo mv
/etc/init.d/alsa-utils /etc/init.d/alsa-utils.TEMP), reboot, then manually
restore your mixer settings (specifically volume since ALSA starts with
volumes muted for some crazy reason).

I did this, and then did an explicit "alsactl store asound.state.WORKS" so
hopefully if it ever happens again I can restore the sound with a simple
"alsactl restore" call.  I've experienced several XBMC *and* mythfrontend
crashes since then with no recurring problems yet.
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