alsa locks up periodically

bobbens · 12-27-2005, 01:04 PM

I've been seeing that my sound has been acting funny lately, so i decided to log it. The main places i noticed this is when i either watch a movie or play a game with alsa during a long time, since this doesnt happen fast usually. It doesn't stop anything, just freezes sound for a bit in games or stops the playback on the movie for a few seconds (5-15 seconds) and then resumes, which isn't a great problem, but i mean if it's fixable, why not fix it? The following is the log from VLC (videolan media player):

Code:

[00000310] a52 decoder: A/52 channels:2 samplerate:48000 bitrate:192000
ALSA lib pcm.c:1969:(snd_pcm_open_conf) Invalid type for PCM iec958:AES0=0x2,AES1=0x82,AES2=0x0,AES3=0x2 definition (id: iec958, value: cards.pcm.iec958)
[00000315] main private error: option glx-shm does not exist
[00000261] main playlist: stopping playback

The bold text is the alsa related problem, and the rest is just vlc verbose messages. I do have two video cards, well an onboard one and my pci one

Code:

0000:01:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1370 [AudioPCI] (rev 01)

. I'm using alsa version 1.0.10 from debian SID repositories. From what the output says it looks like it has problems opening the PCM, but i really don't know enough about linux sound systems to be able to make much of this. Any advice?

halvy · 01-06-2006, 12:02 PM

did you find the problem?

you didn't post your specs, but i'm assuming your sys can handle two videos simultaniously.

i wish i could help other than saying that it does sound 'simple' (if you know which item to tweak)

good luck.

bobbens · 01-06-2006, 12:40 PM

It could be the VLC player, still have to run more tests, but since the problem can take anywhere from 15 minutes to one hour to appear, it takes time... It's not serious, but if it starts to bother me i'll get on it seriously.