Comment 0 for bug 1641954

Revision history for this message
Cristian Klein (cristiklein) wrote :

PulseAudio 8.0 includes a well-known user-experience regression: Its new auto-routing algorithm tries to switch to another output, as soon as the active output gets disconnected. This leads to the following bad user experience:

(1) Alice listens to music on her speakers, which are connected to the screen, which is connected through HDMI to the computer.

(2) Alice leaves the computer, the screen gets suspended (DPMS off).

(3) PulseAudio sees that the HDMI output got disconnected (although only for a short interval) and switches to internal speaker.

(4) Alice returns to the computer but finds that the music is now playing through the internal speakers.

(5) Alice can switch the output to the HDMI speakers manually, but the above user experience bug will reoccur when she leaves the computer again.

This is a well-known upstream bug that was fixed in PulseAudio 9.0. Due to the fact that Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS uses PulseAudio 8.0, it is desirable to backport this fix to PulseAudio 8.0, so that all LTS users have better experience. Upstream said they would not do this and that I should report this to Ubuntu directly.

Other information:
* Upstream bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93946
* Fix 1: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/?id=04040c522f5f62dda50ac927e92453381d419f09
* Fix 2: https://github.com/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/23c15c3b52a958887c1f8cad3c94879a8770ef0e