Multimedia Problem...
...and thankfully an easy solution.
When you install multimedia support in Ubuntu, it has a default setting of 'don't really work properly' - I suspect this is to make it integrate perfectly with the rest of the system.
I initially tested Divx video in the Totem Movie Player. Totem is nice - it's compact, it fits in with the GUI theme, and therefore it has nice square boundaries. Media players which force you to move around all your other windows to make them fit around their elaborate designs are a real pet hate of mine, so it's great that there's a nice boring alternative to use.
Anyways, the video played, but there were immediate problems with sound. From beginning to end, all sound was out of sync. So I closed Totem and loaded the video in Xine Movie Player. This was a little better - sound was in sync for as long as I watched the movie. Unfortunately that was all of 3 seconds, because it would crash my whole computer when I tried to hide the playback controls.
It was obvious that I was going to have to google again. Luckily I found a solution in a few minutes. By default the desktop uses something called ESD for sound. It sucked. I changed it to use OSS, which sucked less but still had sync problems. I then selected ALSA. Perfect. Now all video has sound which is perfectly in sync!
Now I just have to ask.... why the hell wasn't it set to ALSA by default!
posted by Chris at 2:20 PM
5 Comments:
Just get VLC. http://www.videolan.org/
4:37 PM
ESD is the Enlightened Sound Daemon, the sound server used by GNOME. Wikipedia says that "A sound server is software usually running in the background on a PC or Mac to manage the use of and access to audio devices, most notably, the soundcard. The term could also apply to a server dedicated to audio streaming or a networked or stand-alone appliance for playing sounds and sound files."
From a search through Google, it looks like both ESD and its KDE counterpart, aRtsd, suck horrible because of bad/outdated design and because no one wants to touch the code. Apparently you discovered one of the reasons. ;-)
4:06 AM
I was using ESD back in the '90s and as I recall, it was capable of mixing multiple streams before this feature was available in other ways. Also, ESD can operate over a network like X does - so a bunch of machines can use the one with nice speakers as a sound server. Probably this is the source of the problems, as it may be buffering and sending data over the local loopback network interface to get to the local ESD server.
As to why not ALSA by default? Tradition, priorities etc I guess. It probably should be the default for a desktop distro like Ubuntu.
7:04 AM
I agree.
Get VLC!
It works for you,
It works for me!
Yah, OK but seriously!
If you just want Ubuntu to "just work,"
consider using Automatix.
It works great for a quick setup.
Almost any file will play on my machines. I don't perticularly like the mplayer web plugin, but I s'pose I could change my prefs in Firefox to fix.
And you must be aware of the ubuntuforums.org site, right? Super-helpful.
Aloha, and welcome to free computing.
Terry of Astoria
astoria.doesntexist.com
3:02 PM
ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) just the kernel driver part of the whole game. Since you can have multiple source of audio that your hardware can handle (well some of them have only one stereo channel for example) mixing is needed which is out of scope from the point view of the kernel. ESD basically do this however its design is quite outdated now. If you have sound card with multiple hw channels and/or you don't care about multiple programs want to produce audio at the same time you'd better forget ESD and use only ALSA directly everywhere. However as you see it would be problematic to set this as default. Another topic: Also try MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/), which is the No1 player for UNIX (including Linux) systems.
3:03 AM
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