On Monday 08 May 2006 02:56, Peter Van Lone wrote:

a user on the linuxquestions.org forum replied with:

"Try "alsamixer" in a console. It's the lowest level controller."

it worked. I was able to change the volume on the "CD" column to 100 (from 0) and now can play cd's.

It seems that there is still something funky, but I need to gather info about what the actual issues are before I post any further qs

Peter, Alsamixer works on my system, too, but it isn't a precise match to my hardware and driver. In fact, it not only picks up the existing chip (SiS SI7018) but also 'phantom' hardware... a non-existent "Realtek ALC100/100P rev 38" controller. The bottom line is I had horrible luck trying to use this sound system until I found a mixer that was correctly integrated to the chip... in this case QAmix. What hardware are you dealing with, anyway (mainboard make/model and, if appropriate, sound card make/model?) regards, Carl

On Monday 08 May 2006 21:48, Peter Van Lone wrote:

info.product = '82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller'

What seems to be the case now is just a series of oddities. Much of it I am sure because I don't understand what is supposed to go where. Mplayer works in some places, not in others, amarok can't see audio cd's, nor can juk or real player, but kscd does just fine. Mplayer and kaffeine can "see" dvd's but one can play some, and the other plays still others. Actually, mplayer has allowed me to browse to the contents of some dvds, and thus play the corresponding files found fhere *sometimes* -- but it does not seem to be able to "open DVD" generally, as I can do with Kaffeine.

Let me see if I can help you sort some of this out. I'm pulling this from memory, so if I've erred, I'm sure others will correct me as necessary. My understanding is that Amarok uses the helix engine... which I believe is the OSS component of the RealPlayer engine, meaning it doesn't play anything requiring proprietary RealPlayer codecs. To view content encoded using a proprietary RealPlayer codec, you'll need to install and use RealPlayer10Gold. IOW, the helix engine covers a subset of the content that RealPlayer10Gold can play. Given this state of affairs, my preference is to just use RealPlayer10Gold (my configuration explained below.) It is also my understanding that the win32 codecs are used by MPlayer and mplayerplug-in *only*. MPlayer is a standalone player... mplayerplug-in is the same engine as MPlayer but, as the name implies, is provided as a set of plug-ins for Mozilla/Firefox which allow you to launch streams and play files externally or embedded in web pages, depending upon how the links have been coded in the page. xine is another player... an engine (actual name is libxine?) and Kaffeine is a GUI that uses the xine engine to play files (maybe streams, too.) IOW, whatever capabilities you enable in xine are automatically enabled in Kaffeine. Is your head spinning yet? ;-) Here's how I configure my system to deal with all of these formats and players: First, SUSE 10.0 by default installs "mozplugger" which, in essence, attempts to give Mozilla/Firefox many of the same capabilities as Konqueror (opening .pdf files, .txt files, graphics files, OOo spreadsheets and word processing documents, etc.) I use Firefox as a browser and use Konqueror for all that other stuff. mozplugger will interfere with the plug-ins discussed below. As root, I do "rpm -e mozplugger" then "ldconfig" then "SuSEconfig". MPlayer/mplayerplug-in handles most, but not all, Quicktime (*.mov) files. If it 'hiccups' on a particular .mov file, I look for a Windows Media Player or RealPlayer version of the same content instead of trying to 'debug' or 'force' MPlayer/mplayerplug-in to play it. The 'hiccup' is telling you the file is encoded with an older and 'obsolete' Quicktime codec that isn't compatible with MPlayer. MPlayer/mplayerplug-in also handles RealPlayer (*.rm, *.ram, *.rv, *.rmm, rtsp:// etc.) media. **I disable this by removing all instances (links and files) of mplayerplug-in-rm.so and mplayerplug-in-rm.xpt. First, dig around in /opt/MozillaFirefox or /opt/mozilla or /opt/Firefox to look for these links and remove them. Then go to /usr/lib/browser-plugins and remove the actual plug-ins. Then dig around in and under ~/.mozilla or ~/.firefox to delete the file 'pluginreg.dat' **while Firefox is closed** to force Firefox to re-register the installed plug-ins. You are disabling Real content playback in Mozilla/Firefox using MPlayer/mplayerplug-in because these plug-ins conflict with the helix/RealPlayer plug-ins, discussed next. RealPlayer10Gold plays back all Real encoded content with the exception of "obsoleted" encodings... which require RealPlayer8 (I keep this installed in parallel for these fairly rare circumstances. YMMV.) This is an easy package to install and use. It doesn't require any real 'tweaking' other than the following: To view streams (embedded or externally) using mplayerplug-in *and* RealPlayer10 in Mozilla/Firefox, you have to register the "rtsp" and "mms" protocols with the browser. I'll use Firefox in this instruction... Enter "about:config" in the Firefox address bar. Search for "mms" (no quotes) and then "rtsp" in the "Filter" field. If they don't exist, add the following preferences: Preference Name Type Value network.protocol-handler.app.mms string /usr/bin/mplayer network.protocol-handler.external.mms boolean true network.protocol-handler.app.rtsp string /usr/bin/realplay network.protocol-handler.external.rtsp boolean true (Make sure RealPlayer10Gold and mplayerplug-in are installed before you do this and you've deleted 'pluginreg.dat' as described previously.) When done, close and relaunch Firefox. I don't use xine or Kaffeine or Amarok or Totem or Noatun. The only other player I use on a regular basis is xmms for .pls and .m3u streams. YMMV. The reason I don't need to use these other players is I seem to be able to play just about everything coded in common ("mainstream?") formats using the ones I've configured, above. If I've left omitted or misstated something, I'm sure others will straighten it out. As I said, this is from memory. Also, I "don't do" DVD or CD playback on this computer... that's just me. Hopefully someone else can help you debug or configure the media access functions after you've got the players sorted out. Good luck! Carl

On Tuesday 09 May 2006 22:48, Peter Van Lone wrote:

Again, thank you very very much ...

You're welcome... I hope it helps! BTW, I implied, but didn't clearly state that MPlayer/mplayerplug-in handles almost all of the other common media formats that you would expect windows media player to handle. So, between RealPlayer10Gold and MPlayer/mplayerplug-in, most of the important formats are covered. regards, Carl