Arch Linux

ksovi

Member

From: Newcastle

Registered: 2011-02-02

Posts: 36

amarok without phonon-xine

Hi guys,

first of all I wanna say i understand why phonon-xine has been dropped and that it can sort of be installed from aur, but just wanted to hear your thoughts on this.
I believe amarok without phonon-xine is useless. gstreamer is not even close to what xine used to be, especially when it comes to streaming, and vlc backend is just a cruel joke.
Of course i tried to install xine backend from aur but amarok won't start with it installed and i couldn't find any workaround yet..

what are your thoughts on this?

>>>>>>

later edit: I found I can start amarok with LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libxine.so amarok which is the best solution for now.

Last edited by ksovi (2011-10-12 21:37:10)

eric

Member

From: under heaven

Registered: 2004-02-11

Posts: 117

Re: amarok without phonon-xine

Thanks for the solution (the LD_PRELOAD trick) I've changed KDE's sound settings back to xine.

Phonon-xine also has 50% less CPU usage (with Amarok) and is able to do gapless playback, both advantages over Phonon-{gstreamer,vlc}.

You can also put:

export LD_PRELOAD="${LD_PRELOAD+${LD_PRELOAD}:}/usr/lib/libxine.so"

in a file in ~/.kde4/share/env to make all KDE-apps able to use phonon-xine.

Last edited by eric (2011-10-15 13:23:11)

KlavKalashj

Member

Registered: 2008-10-09

Posts: 376

Re: amarok without phonon-xine

What about phonon-mplayer? It seems people often forget/don't know it exists. I don't notice any difference at all between the three, I just prefer the fewer dependencies.

eric

Member

From: under heaven

Registered: 2004-02-11

Posts: 117

Re: amarok without phonon-xine

When phonon-xine stopped working (some 3 months ago?), I've tried phonon-gstreamer, -vlc and also -mplayer. If I remember correctly, phonon-mplayer had the lowest CPU-load... so, I switched from phonon-xine to -mplayer. But after a few days of KDE's uptime, always something went wrong (I don't remember what exactly) and I had to restart phonon by restarting KDE. I think the problem was when playing different sounds at the same time (sound notification because of window movement + playing a song with Amarok). The first few days this works well, but after a few days uptime phonon-mplayer stops working and I had to restart phonon (by restarting KDE).

This ofcourse is not a problem when one does not mind to restart KDE, or if one does not play many different sounds at the same time. But I like sound notifications and I don't like to restart KDE or reboot the computer.

Another problem with phonon-mplayer is the lack of gapless playback. This is not a problem with most of my playlists, but I have a few playlists where the tracks should not be "played" with a pause between track changes. The pause was shorter than with phonon-{gstreamer,vlc} though.

ksovi

Member

From: Newcastle

Registered: 2011-02-02

Posts: 36

Re: amarok without phonon-xine

yea, sure, phonon mplayer is good, i like it a lot, but there is no equalizer support in amarok.
but i agree, much much better than gstreamer