KDE Phonon - really?

fogpipe · 06-06-2012, 08:44 PM

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?

fogpipe · 06-06-2012, 10:52 PM

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.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 5
/etc/rc.d/rc.alsa restart

A stupid solution to a stupid problem. Vary according to how your distro arranges its init scripts.

Erik_FL · 06-11-2012, 08:40 PM

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.