Cannot setup Phonon correctly
 

I have just recently built my first Gentoo distro (amd64) with a KDE 4.3 desktop environment. I managed to get my video card setup without too much hasstle but so far I have been unable to get my sound card setup properly.

The sound works for all apps that bypass Phonon (firefox, vlc etc) but anything that relies on phonon does not work. I do not get the sound when I log in, the mp3/oggs/avi simply do not play in KDEs native apps. My environment is workable however I would rather get this working properly.

My sound card is Creative Audigy SE 7.1 , I have tried several posts from other forums but without any luck including re-emerging pulseaudio. I am assuming this is a setup problem as the sound is working for other items and the mixer shows all the controls in the ALSA mixer.

Bear in mind, I hate all this stuff. Sound in linux is terrible. So I know little about phonon and its current state.

I'd first try the latest kde release, 4.3.4 if my memory serves correctly. Also, take a look at the phonon USE flags. Phonon can use a number of backends, including alsa, xine, pulseaudio and gstreamer. I'd probably USE="xine alsa -pulseaudio -gstreamer" for this concrete package, because that's my preference, yours might differ. Common sense will tell you what to do. If you use alsa for the rest of your audio apps you probably want alsa support in phonon as well. I strongly suggest xine as your multimedia backend because it works, unlike gstreamer (my view, anyway).

You should also check the phonon configuration in the systemsettings application. It might not be called "phonon", but something different relating multimedia, I don't really remember. Check the configuration, and see that phonon is using your chosen backend, and not something else.

As a last note, note that the pulseaudio stuff might easily conflict with everything else in the world, so you might not get a sound from one application using pulse if you have another app using alsa, jacks or whatever else running in the background. As said, the state of the sound foundation in Linux is suboptimal, to say it softly.

Thanks for the reply i92guboj, between the Gentoo forums and some friends on identi.ca I was able to sort this problem. Pulse Audio is so fickle it drives me mad at times. Anyway the problem is sorted. I tried 4 solutions, none of them worked initially, but upon starting up Gentoo the next day I was greeted with a sound :-)

What do I need to install from the Gentoo repos that will give me the video codecs I desire (avi, divx, ogv & mp4) that seems to be an area I'm sticking at.

When there is no sound, I will usually run "alsaconf" and my distro's sound configuration tool.

In KDE, look for "Configure Desktop". I think the binary is called "systemsettings". Under Computer Administration select "Multimedia".
Here you can select devices to use for different classes of applications, and play a test tone. You can highlight different devices and test the output. One of these are for pulse audio. If none of the devices play the test audio, you probably need to start with alsa. Alsa may be used for the input to pulse and also the output.

Also look at "padevchooser" and also the "Volume Control..." settings you can launch from the padevchooser applet.
You can check the server and sink settings. In the last tab of the "Volume Control..." (the pavucontrol program) "Configuration", you can select different devices for the profile.

Right now I am piping my laptops audio from Amarok, to my desktop which has an IEC958 optical connection to my stereo. I can do this from my netbook as well. I select the desktop as the pulse server, select the desktop's IEC958 for the sync and check the profile.

It depends on your player of choice and the backend it uses. Usually, in Gentoo this is controlled via USE flags. If you use vlc, for example, then you would set the use flags for vlc, enabling the features you want. Gentoo will do the rest for you when you emerge vlc.

If you use a xine based player (like kaffeine, which I'd recommend for you if you are a kde user), then you have to look at the use flags for the xine-lib package.