KDE Phonon - really?
I have been trying out various distros lately, mostly i guess hoping that somethign new had happened in desktop development. I get a little bored every now and then with my usual setup, fluxbox rox and $panel.
KDE it seems has taken a major step backward in out of the box usability with phonon. It detects duplicate devices, devices that dont exist and even pops up little notifications that let you know that your sound isnt working because its too confused to find a sound device that does work. This is crazy. What were the developers thinking? And yes i got it to work so im not asking for advice on how to start it or make it work. You make it work by clicking arrows to move stuff up and down for every category of sound that you want to listen to (bear farts in the forest? ooh yeah ill do a few dozen clicks for that) and restarting alsa as needed, as opposed to sound just working out of the box. Seriously guys, what the hell were you thinking? |
Have yet to have any issues with sound. It just works.
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That hasnt been my experience. I usually have at least 5 sound devices dectected by phonon, including Esound and it seems to disable the first one it detects at start, and if that is the real one, the one that works, i have to restart alsa and maybe move devices up and down the list again. For me its just not worth the hassle. If kde is trying to be more windows like they have certainly succeeded imo, putting the user thru pointless busywork to reclaim functionality that should have just been there from the beginning. The reason snd-card 0 is snd-card 0 is that thats the one you are supposed to use first.
This seems to be a trend i have noticed lately tho, taking configuration mistakes out of the hands of users and writing a dedicatated application to handle them, maybe its a step forward? |
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Here's your answer straight from Wikipedia, Quote:
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Which is why there are several phonon backends. Phonon - KDE UserBase Wiki - http://userbase.kde.org/Phonon#Backend_libraries |
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So you're complaining that it's configurable? :confused:
The real problem with Phonon for me is that only KDE things use it. I've got USB speakers. Gnome and Mate usually come with a tool to activate them. So does KDE, providing you're willing to use Dragon and Rekonq rather than VLC and Firefox. |
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This is Free software; if you don't like it; instead of whinging, you should make it better. If you can't code, make a contribution with a donation.
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There is some way to force the settings with phonon. I cant recall how its done (alt + F2-> kdesu something?). As phonon seems to work 100% of the time for me I've never had to figure out how. Quote:
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I use firefox with KDE, and VLC sometimes, no issues at all here. |
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Ok, i take it back. The problems i was experiencing with phonon previously do not appear in my recent install of slackware. In fact it worked fine. It must have been due to whatever distro specific tweaks had been made in the other linuxes i was trying. So sorry, my bad.
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The only thing that helps to fix things is to report the bugs you find to the bugtracking system the developers use. |
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You know, i take back taking it back. I have tried every backend and the best i can get from phonon is that it requires me to restart alsa every time i log back into kde. Too bad too. I do like the way it looks. Is there a way to kill phonon?
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Ok, so part of the problem appears to be that the instance of phonon that runs gets a death grip on the sound card. The work around i came up with is to have a script run at start up.
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#!/bin/bash |
I've recently had problems with KDE and Phonon because I have both a built-in sound codec and Logitech headphones. KDE 4 used to switch devices based on the priority that I set in Phonon but in release 4.8.3 it seems to always use the built-in sound codec. I finally had to edit a configuration file called ".asoundrc" to use the correct default device. Unfortunately I have to edit that file every time I want to switch between headphones and the internal sound chip, then restart X-Windows. Sometimes I have to reboot if the sound still doesn't work with KDE.
The other problem that I've had is in order to get AMAROK to play MP3 files I had to install additional "gstreamer" libraries. The other media players did play MP3 files, but AMAROK could not until I installed the extra libraries. Sound in KDE has always been a little complicated, and so has the software for sound in Linux. I've even had to edit a few driver source files to get sound mixers working right on laptops. There seems to be no standard for which channels are used for what on a particular sound chip. Even the same laptop manufacturer may use different channels on different laptops with the same sound chip. A lot of this is due to the same problem that happened with modems. As more is done in software the software becomes closed and proprietary, and the hardware becomes simpler and less standard. Pretty soon you end up with only Windows being supported on hardware, and then only a particular version of Windows. I don't know how the people writing software for Linux sound manage to get it working as well as they do. |
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