Flash and mplayer can't coexist with jack [SOLVED]

[Pablo]

Hi,

I am running 64studio 3.0 beta3. I don't have pulseaudio installed.

I followed thorgal's idea here:

http://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic ... lash#p5400

to have vimeo and youtube videos working with jack. To have the needed libraries, I installed
the "libasound2-plugins" package.

Vimeo and you tube videos have sound through jack, they appear as alsa-jack ports in qjackctl.

However this has spoiled mplayer. If I run mplayer as a standalone video player or if I click a link
to a song in firefox which launchs the mplayer plugin for mozilla, I have and awful lot of xruns
and the sound is terrible.

As a workaround I have done two launchers called "mplayer up" and "flash up"; the former renames
and moves the .asoundrc file to somewhere else, the latter brings it back home.

Thorgal, are you OK with this, and how? Has someone else the same issue?

I can use VLC to see the videos but I think the mplayer plugin for firefox is
needed to listen to linked songs. Or is there another workaround you know of?

I think this is a mplayer bug. I could try updating mplayer. I'm at 1.0 rc2.
I'll try to update...

[thorgal]

ciao Pablo,

There are a couple of workarounds:

1- oss2jack ... a bit tough because of the kernel API change since 2.6.24. I had a patch set that raboof saved on his website. They work against kernel 2.6.29.x and oss2jack-0.25. It is sort of worth it because you have permanent jack ports from a fake /dev/dsp. But tough road ...

2- much simpler: configure mplayer to use jack for its audio backend:

in $HOME/.mplayer, you have a config file. Here is mine:

Code: Select all

# Write your default config options here!
ao=jack,oss,alsa
vo=x11
monitoraspect=1.6

never mind the 'vo' and 'monitoraspect' options. See the 'ao' option:

it will try to use jack first, then oss, and last alsa.
It is working fine, never had any problem with mplayer. In fact, I often use it as a command line client to quickly play audio files, shoutcast streams, etc, through jack.

Of course, it requires that mplayer is compiled with jack support. My debian multimedia version is mplayer v. 1:1.0.rc2svn20080706-0.1. A bit outdated probably ? I don't know. I use it only for audio on my DAW PC (therefore the conservative vo=x11 since I disabled video overlay of my internal GPU).

Hope this helps
T.

[Pablo]

Hi thorgal,

Indeed, I already had jack support for mplayer but the .asoundrc file
needed for the alsa-jack ports was messing things up.
Now, the "ao" in the conf file in mplayer did the trick!
Mange tak!!

Pablo

[studio32]

Both solutions works nice here, thanks

edit: all though, after playing some youtube videos the sound stream seems to be lost somewhere...

[DioXide]

Why do you have so much trouble with this?

1. Open YouTube/Vimeo video

3. Go to /tmp (on your hard drive)

4. Open the file with the "video" icon, prefixed with "Flash".
Do so on your favorite video player, with Jack support and hardware video acceleration

5. Bash me for omitting step 2

Of curse, this works much better when you open only one video at a time, because the files will have random names, but two or three videos are pretty doable if you set your file browser to "sort by modification date".
I normally do 2 videos at a time, and it's not a pain at all, I enjoy a lot using SMplayer instead of the crappy YouTube Flash thing.

It's better if you wait for the video to load completely before opening, because while using your normal off-line player, it's very easy to forget that it's streaming and fast-forward like crazy.
But if you don't want to wait, it works either way, just wait until there is a reasonable amount loaded so that you don't get nasty surprises.

(Hint: This way if you want to keep the video, you just have to copy/paste it )