Doesn't work well with the pulseaudio alsa plugin

[Reinhard Tartler]

Binary package hint: vlc

Taken from http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=472811:

  VLC only plays without audio when using the pulse alsa plugin. When i looked
  into this it seems that VLC requests quite a big buffer. Which is ofcourse
  fine. Pulseaudio allows such a big buffer and will start playing when the
  requested buffer is nearly full.

  What this means is that untill the buffer is full the reported latency will
  obviously increase. Unfortunately it seems that the latency of a full buffer
  is so big that VLC thinks something is wrong and starts playing without
  audio.

  Changing the buffer size of 256 periods to 16 periods seems to fix this
  issue. (Somewhat of a workaround but still)

  Sjoerd

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

I have been asked by upstream to include that patch from debian:

09:08:46 < j-b> siretart: ok, so you don't do the alsa patch too ?
09:09:18 < siretart> doesn't seem so, no
09:10:03 * j-b gives a patch to siretart
09:11:33 < j-b> siretart: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=5;filename=alsa.patch;att=1;bug=472811
09:16:18 < j-b> siretart: Mandriva and a few other distro have it

[Hew (hew)]

Was this issue ever resolved?

[Kwinz (ldm)]

Is this related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vlc/+bug/417098 ?

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

@kwinz: no, bug #417098 is more or less the exact opposite: the buffer is too small for that reporter.

FWIW, I think the pulseaudio output plugin should improve the situation for more people.

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

I've pushed the patch to the debian packaging branch. This patch seems to apply to the 1.0.x series as well.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package vlc - 1.0.3-1ubuntu1

---------------
vlc (1.0.3-1ubuntu1) lucid; urgency=low

  * Merge from Debian unstable (LP: #435524), remaining changes:
    - build against xulrunner-dev instead of iceape-dev
    - build against libx264-dev and install libx264 plugin
    - add Xb-Npp header to vlc package
    - recommend vlc-plugin-pulse for vlc
    - backport patch "402_increase_pulseaudio_score.diff"

vlc (1.0.3-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release

  [ Reinhard Tartler ]
  * Decrease alsa buffer size. That improves the behaviour of the alsa output
    module on pulseaudio system. But note that vlc-plugin-pulse provides a
    native pulseaudio output module (Closes: #472811, LP: #243152)

  [ Christophe Mutricy ]
  * No longer need to build an extra libvlccore without altivec
  * Add the upnp access module (LP: #172938)
  * Activate the new udev SD module on linux archs
 -- Reinhard Tartler <email address hidden> Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:29:11 +0100