Arch Linux

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Stuttering audio in multimedia players (totem, gxine, etc.)

Whenever I play something in Totem, and do anything that causes a spike in CPU activity (e.g. rendering a large web page, dragging the Galeon window around), the sound and video output from Totem starts spluttering; this is especially obvious if the CPU activity spike occurs within a few seconds after Totem has been started up, in which case dragging the Totem window will also cause it to skip.

(FWIW, yes, I have disabled the libvisual display, because that causes even worse skipping trouble.)

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: Stuttering audio in multimedia players (totem, gxine, etc.)

Okay it's not just totem-gstreamer, this crap happens with gxine too... Move a Firefox window around over it and the sound stutters to a halt. I wonder if the realtime audio isn't working properly or something.

test1000

Member

Registered: 2005-04-03

Posts: 834

Re: Stuttering audio in multimedia players (totem, gxine, etc.)

hm... I had stutters like this before i switched to oss2jack.(effectively switching to jack) Which I've just given testing repository-kernel compatibilty in AUR.

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KISS = "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Albert Einstein

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: Stuttering audio in multimedia players (totem, gxine, etc.)

Shouldn't be a problem with ALSA though... Also, why should it only occur in video players?

test1000

Member

Registered: 2005-04-03

Posts: 834

Re: Stuttering audio in multimedia players (totem, gxine, etc.)

because the extra video load fills up the bottleneck which causes alsa to surrender?

jack is better than dmix in this respect.

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KISS = "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Albert Einstein

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: Stuttering audio in multimedia players (totem, gxine, etc.)

Even if there's nothing else sending stuff to my soundcard?

(I should also note that this is a very recent thing, first cropped up with GStreamer in Gnome after dmix had been working properly for a while. Doesn't seem to affect MPlayer either for some reason.)

Edit: in Xine it happens even with OpenGL video output (which works now that I've reinstalled Arch). Also, it only seems to be induced in GXine by dragging a Firefox window over the GXine window. In addition I have to mention that moving a Firefox window around anywhere will cause GXine's Goom display to become slow and jerky.

test1000

Member

Registered: 2005-04-03

Posts: 834

Re: Stuttering audio in multimedia players (totem, gxine, etc.)

Even if there's nothing else sending stuff to my soundcard?

The bottleneck doesn't need to be the soundcard, but the cpu. The cpu also calculate sound. If the cpu is hogged in some way, then soundplayback will suffer.

Either way, I supposeyou could just use pure jack. There's a gst-plugins-jack in extra repo, (0.8 though)

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KISS = "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Albert Einstein