totem-gstreamer does not play sound

[Jarno Suni]

This is in Xubuntu Karmic beta. No sound no matter what audio/video file I try. VLC plays fine. No pulseaudio in use. Hardware is Samsung NC10 laptop.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Oct 3 10:58:22 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/totem
Package: alsa-base 1.0.20+dfsg-1ubuntu4
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-11.36-generic
SourcePackage: alsa-driver
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-11-generic i686

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

Maybe totem is configured to use pulseaudio since sound works in totem in another computer that has Xubuntu Karmic running with pulseaudio.

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

I installed pulseaudio and changed sound card in Mixer settings to be "Playback: Internal Audio Analog Stereo (PulseAudio Mixer)", unmuted and adjusted master volume. Thereafter totem plays sound.

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

But as soon as I kill pulseaudio by "pulseaudio --kill" totem does not play sound anymore. Other players, such as VLC play even without pulseaudio. If Xubuntu is going to be released without pulseaudio and totem is the player there, something has to be done.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Jarno Suni <email address hidden> wrote:
> But as soon as I kill pulseaudio by "pulseaudio --kill" totem does not
> play sound anymore. Other players, such as VLC play even without
> pulseaudio. If Xubuntu is going to be released without pulseaudio and
> totem is the player there, something has to be done.

GStreamer will fall back to ALSA appropriately.

PulseAudio is not seeded in Xubuntu Karmic.

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

But totem-gstreamer does not playback sound here anyway without pulseaudio.

[Gustavo Carneiro (gjc)]

I confirm the problem; totem does not seem to work without pulseaudio.

This is what makes people mad about PA; the whole system is increasingly being built around PA in a way that sooner or later it won't work without PA. In karmik, the volume control applet no longer works without PA, and now I am seeing that neither does the movie player. Given the fragmentation in the audio community, I think choice should be given to at least some end users to be able to uninstall PA and just use plain ALSA. That choice is being gradually removed from us, release by release. That is not nice.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug, is the issue specific to totem? did you try rhythmbox too? and other software?

[Gustavo Carneiro (gjc)]

I know that at least rhythmbox (the music player I use) plays very well over plain ALSA all day long. But totem just fails silently (no pun intended, but it applies :)

[Gustavo Carneiro (gjc)]

totem seems to be hardcoded to use pulseaudio. I have previously run gstreamer-properties and configured ALSA as default output, but totem ignores it:

gjc@nazgul:Media$ totem --gst-debug-level=2 file.avi
0:00:00.025453780 5143 0x8540e0 WARN GST_PLUGIN_LOADING gstplugin.c:422:gst_plugin_register_func: plugin "/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstladspa.so" failed to initialise
0:00:00.285448762 5142 0x8540e0 WARN pulse pulsesink.c:442:gst_pulseringbuffer_open_device:<audio-sink> error: Failed to connect: Connection refused

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

This should be fixed in Ubuntu 10.04 now. Thanks for reporting.

[Santiago Roland (santiago-roland)]

This bug is still present in Xubuntu 12.04

Best Regards,