[mythtv-users] xbmc killed my sound

[Brad DerManouelian]

On Oct 13, 2008, at 9:57 AM, Willy Boyd wrote:

> 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.


Thanks for the tip. I did manually blow away my alsa settings, changed  
them with alsamixer and saved them again without any luck. I copied  
off everything I think I needed to and have reformatted my machine.  
Sound is back and happy. I'm just not recompiling mythtv and well on  
my way to a working system again. It's nice to have the day off from  
work. ;)

-Brad