No sound after playing a mkv file with digital audio

[Merlijn]

I have sound working via SPDIF, was a lot more trouble then in Ubuntu, where it just works.. Alas, after playing any old .MKV file with digital audio, there is no sound from Amarok, or any VLC playing avi flie?? When i go to audio setup in the mixer 'test' gives system sound, but only a system monitor use to end process Kmix and then restarting Kmix (using quit does not do this!?) gives back sound, i see on my receiver Digital Audio jump back to the standard surround setting as soon as i end Kmix, any tips at how to fix or prevent this? Or even any one who can confirm this?

[SteveRiley]

Re: No sound after playing a mkv file with digital audio

Linux sound is a mystery that I have not fully groked yet. It certainly ought to be simple:



I've found the KDE page on the PulseAudio wiki to be helpful at times. With regularity but no apparent pattern, my Phonon configuration reverts to the second illustration on that page. The suggestion of running pulse-audio-kde works every time. I do it from Kicker ([Alt]+[F2]).

[Merlijn]

Re: No sound after playing a mkv file with digital audio

That problem i had before this, combined with ' stereo only' sound. Simple fix was removing Pulseaudio, a plethora of sound options was instant available including Dolby 7.1 . That leaves me then with the afore mended problem (and the need to install an alsa mixer to activate the channels)

[SteveRiley]

Re: No sound after playing a mkv file with digital audio

Yeah, while Pulse seems to want to unify the mess that is Linux audio, a lot of folks seem to get along better without it. You'll note in the diagram above that, with the exception of libcanberra, everything that talks to Pulse can also bypass Pulse. And even libcanberra now has a GStreamer backend, so you can purge Pulse and still enjoy that all-important desktop logon sound.

I don't have SPDIF to experiment with, so I can't try to replicate your problem. Possibly tailing some Alsa config files while duplicating and then fixing the problem would reveal what configuration settings are getting changed? At least that might provide information for a bug report.

[Merlijn]

Re: No sound after playing a mkv file with digital audio

I would love to help, but you lost me here "Possibly tailing some Alsa config files while duplicating and then fixing the problem would reveal what configuration settings are getting changed? At least that might provide information for a bug report." No clue what to do and where, Kmix, is btw marked as a 'Zombie' when i go to system monitor to kill it, after a restart of kmix, that zombie thing is gone. I just noticed this when it happened again this morning.

[SteveRiley]

Re: No sound after playing a mkv file with digital audio

I was thinking of .conf files in /usr/share/alsa...but upon closer examination, those files don't appear to change much. The kmix* files in ~/.kde/share/config might be better candidates.

tail is a command that displays the ends of files. For the case here, where we're trying to detect changes made to a file, those changes might actually occur at not-the-end. So a better command would be

watch -n 5 -d cat file

which displays the file and then sits and waits for changes. It polls every five (in this example) seconds, and if it sees changes, it displays them. Run it in a Konsole, looking at a file of interest (say one of those kimx* files) and see what happens. Unfortunately, I can't be more specific than this, since I can't duplicate your setup. But it's how I'd troubleshoot. Perhaps someone here on KFN with more audio experience will chime in.