[mythtv-users] MythTV and Pulseaudio

[Ross Campbell]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Brian J. Murrell <brian at interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:
> I'd argue this Pulseaudio and
> Mythtv discussion is far more on topic that most of the (OT at least)
> chatter that goes on on this list.

It is... For better or worse, Linux distros are doing deep integration
of pulseaudio in the desktop environments, and the simple "disable
pulse audio by doing X" is turning into this mess:
http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8284273 with a
batch of caveats and broken pieces that some people like me may
actually care about.

Myth disables pulseaudio on startup and if you exec any programs that
expect to use pulse for sound, they may or may not fall back to
another sound server. Example: emulator works from commandline, hangs
when exec'ed from mythgame due to which version of libsdl1.2debian-*
is installed (hint: libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio is the "correct one"
for ubuntu, but that causes no sound and a hang on exit of sdlmame or
presumably any app that uses sdl for sound...! install
libsdl1.2debian-all and apps that use sdl for sound will be able to
fall back to alsa).

I presume the experimental pulseaudio patch that allows the flag below
made it into 0.22, right?

   EXPERIMENTALLY_ALLOW_PULSE_AUDIO=1 mythfrontend

Read a post somewhere suggesting that myth should only disable
pulseaudio when the internal player is playing something back... and
re-enable it when it's done. That would at least ensure that any 3rd
party apps exec'ed from inside myth wouldn't have any sound issues...
barring actual pulseaudio support, that's a better workaround IMHO.

I know all the details behind the linux sound server holy wars and
don't want to incite a riot. Personally, I wish jackd had won, but it
didn't... and my days of having the free time to hack together my own
massively customized linux distribution are drawing to a close. The
relevant point is that not just ignoring pulseaudio as a supported
soundserver, but DISABLING IT by default seems like it is only going
to create more issues as time goes by.

I sincerely hope the pulseaudio devs,  mythtv devs, and ubuntu devs
can all get together and map out the functionality requirements, and
code changed to make pulseaudio work with myth out of the box in the
future.

-Ross