Getting hopeless on Hoary sound problems

[Philippe Landau]

this is a great overview of the struggles for working sound
in current versions of ubuntu/debian/linux, thank you Eamonn.

i guess the developers must be stressed out and somewhat desperate too,
so we do not get updates from them here about their huge efforts.

congratulations for your hard-earned successes; i have no sound
ever since i switched to hoary some 5 months ago :-)

kind regards     philippe

--

Eamonn Sullivan wrote:
> Forgive me a moment while I express some frustration: Getting sound to
> work has been a bit of a nightmare in Hoary. I mean no disrespect for
> any of the developers. I know it's hard, and apparently some people
> have no problems. But for me, the last few weeks has been one problem
> after another. When one thing is fixed, another breaks.
> 
> - When Hoary was using polypaudio, everything worked perfectly, other
> than the intro and exit sounds (I could definitely live without
> those). But just for me. No one else who logged in after me could get
> any sound. The wife and kids weren't amused.
> 
> - OK, devs drop polypaudio and revert to esound. Now everyone can get
> sound, even the intro and exit jingle. But now skype stops working,
> after it was working perfectly under Warty and polypaudio. When I
> start skype by itself, it hangs while trying to connect. When I start
> skype with esddsp ("esddsp skype"), it appears to connect, but I hear
> nothing. At least it doesn't hang.
> 
> - Today I discovered that RealPlayer 10 doesn't work. I tried removing
> and reinstalling. I tried Real's installer and I tried alien on the
> rpms (both methods seem to result in identical setups). When I type
> realplay in a shell, it just hangs before anything displays. When i
> try strace on it, I don't see anything out of the ordinary, it just
> hangs  in the middle of a waitpid ("waitpid(-1, ").
> 
> - I just checked and found out that VLC doesn't work either. When I
> try to open an AVI file I just viewed last week, I get the video fine,
> but no audio.
> 
> What does work: Rhythmbox still works fine (playing straight MP3s,
> shoutcast, etc.) and I still get all the system sounds. I'm using
> Intel motherboard sound -- Intel ICH5 AC'97.
> 
> I just realised that there *is* a common thread among the applications
> that don't work: OSS. RealAudio, VLC and Skype all use OSS, while the
> stuff that does work have joined the 21st century and use Alsa or
> esound. But if I try to choose OSS in System/Multimedia System
> Selector (which is set to ESD at the moment) I get "Failed to
> construct test pipeline for 'OSS - Open Sound System'
> 
> Is anyone else also having problems with RealPlayer, Skype or VLC?
> Anyone have a suggestion on what I can try next?
> 
> -Eamonn
>