Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-gnome (128 mails)

[Bjørn Lie <bjorn.lie@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 18:43 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> Hi

> * 5:1 support. Patch for fixing this
> ( https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=381686 ) has just been
> submitted to autobuild. It supports setting different speaker setups,
> and from the tests from Bjorn and myself, it seems to work correctly,
> but will need further testing, so if you have some nice speakers, test
> them with the latest packages

This one is working very well as far as I can see, huge KUDOS in order.
Only "bug" I've been able to find so far is if one changes speaker-setup
while playing audio, it will kill your audio app. This is to be expected
and hardly a bug, and fixing this can wait till 11.3 (or whenever
upstream has a fix) for all I care. :)

Note to those of you that are updating, make sure you set everything
back to defaults in /etc/pulse/xyz. "All" PA settings are now done per
user, in ~/.pulse

> * volume slider in padevchooser. I haven't had time to finish this
> patch, mainly because I needed some big changes in padevchooser code to
> be able to get all the sinks, so that we change the volume in all of
> them. On Sunday, as soon as I'm back, I'll continue working on this. It
> makes the volume slider show up on left click, like the old volume
> applet. Another option I've been looking at is to add change the old
> volume applet to use PA, which might be much easier.

Sounds good, as long as removing pulseaudio is still an option for those 
that would want that, aka - remove PA and still have the "old fashioned" 
gnomesound applet. But I guess this is what you are aiming for.

> * chirping sound problem is fixed, although some of the default values
> we use now for default.pa (see patch in pulseaudio package) might be
> problematic for some setups, so we probably want to change them as part
> of changing the speaker setups. I'll see what information Bjorn provides
> when I'm back on Sunday and decide on the best

Yeah this one is a nut. Upstream values are ; default-fragments = 4
; default-fragment-size-msec = 25 - when I'm using these values, and set
speakers to 5.1, I have massive stuttering/chirping (even if this has
improved too, now logon sound is played without stutter), it is not as
bad when I only have the audio set for 2.0.

The values we are using now are 16 and 21, this "fixes" for the most
part my stuttering, at the expense of quite huge cpu-usage (when
speakers == 5.1). The problem is this; these values are good for me, but
might be bad for someone else. Hey, they might even bring slower systems
to a crawl! If we stick with upstream values, we have done nothing wrong
and have someone to point our fingers at. 
I do not want this fixed for me and broken for someone else (I'm after
all quite able to change these values) - since most of you see no
problems with the upstream values.

In a relevant ubuntuforum-thread they advocate different values 8 and 5.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4928900

+ adding your user to pulse-rt and pulse-access groups.

Adding my user to these groups have done fsck all for me, but this might
be relevant.
I will be testing out "ubuntus" values and see if they work better, but
as the author of the thread says: These settings are almost ideal for my
audio card: "Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M)
AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)". They may not work as well for you, so
try adjusting the fragment values if you have problems.

And here is our problem, we can't know what values are good for the
million and one different soundcard/chip there is out there, and
therefor we should stick to upstream. We could add a section about this
in the release note (yeah, yeah I know, nobody reads the release notes) 

Please also check these bugs over at ubuntu, 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/188226
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/190754

> Since there have been other changes lately, and given some people's
> complains about PA, please make sure you test the latest packages, to
> make sure we're on track for making everyone happy with PA :-)
> -- 
> Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo@xxxxxxxxxx>

Once again I would like to say great work Rodrigo, having this
speakers-tool thing is a first in the world of linux (afik), at least so
simple and intuitive. 
It should be blogged about by someone that matters :) So PA ain't all
bad :) 

Bjørn

Ps, If I manage to forget tomorrows meeting yet again, someone please
kick me hard the next time you see me.

PPS. Does anyone have a sp/dif and/or hdmi output to test with PA - I
have on my soundcard (spdif), but no hardware to connect it to. :(

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