[Solved] Mplayer, vlc and pulseaudio

R00KIE · 2010-01-15 01:12:24

Is there any special reason why pulseaudio support isn't explicitly enabled in both mplayer and vlc?

I've been looking into the PKGBUILDs and it is not explicitly disabled but as it is these two programs will not know how to output directly to pulseaudio.

Recompiling with --enable-pulse seems to do the trick and at least for the previous version of mplayer it didn't seem to cause any problems, I can't say anything about vlc because I don't use it as often as mplayer.

I guess at least some users may be using alsa + pulse so I'm a bit surprised not to find more _recent_ inquires about this, it's not like I'm talking about patching or something like vbox_ose vs vbox_bin, it's just explicitly enabling it in the PKGBUILD, given that Arch does a very good job at supporting all viable alternatives for sound systems I guess this would make sense.

Last edited by R00KIE (2010-01-15 14:27:37)

wonder · 2010-01-15 01:29:00

can't happen since pulseaudio is in community.

ngoonee · 2010-01-15 01:48:01

I'm using mpd with --enable-pulse, but both my mplayer and vlc do not have --enable-pulse and the alsa plugin seems to work fine (mpd had a problem with periodic crashing).

Until pulseaudio is picked up and adopted (most probably as part of Gnome) and hence moved to [extra], packages can't depend on pulseaudio I believe. Now that I think about it however, would mpd-pulse binary be useable on a system without pulseaudio, for example? If so, and there's not much disk space usage difference, then I don't see why --enable-pulse can't be the default.

lucke · 2010-01-15 01:51:32

mplayer built with pulse support will not work without pulseaudio installed and it's most probably the same with other apps.

ngoonee · 2010-01-15 01:55:06

lucke wrote:

mplayer built with pulse support will not work without pulseaudio installed and it's most probably the same with other apps.

In that case no pulseaudio then. ABS and AUR for that .

R00KIE · 2010-01-15 14:27:23

wonder wrote:

can't happen since pulseaudio is in community.

Haaaaa ok question answered, I'll just rebuild from abs when new versions are pushed to the repos.

I haven't tested if mplayer works without pulseaudio but it should work, its just another output like alsa, oss, jack and others, however you may need to specify the output you want to use (I'd say always explicitly tell programs which output to use, automagical selection doesn't seem a good idea to me), just to make sure mplayer gets it right

About using the alsa plugin .... I'd like to avoid that as much as possible, it does work fine with one app I use that only supports alsa/oss, but another layer of software on top of alsa+pulse seems a little excessive, specially if programs can output directly to pulse.

I'll mark this as solved, I have the answer I was looking for

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-15 01:12:24

[Solved] Mplayer, vlc and pulseaudio

#2 2010-01-15 01:29:00

Re: [Solved] Mplayer, vlc and pulseaudio

#3 2010-01-15 01:48:01

Re: [Solved] Mplayer, vlc and pulseaudio

#4 2010-01-15 01:51:32

Re: [Solved] Mplayer, vlc and pulseaudio

#5 2010-01-15 01:55:06

Re: [Solved] Mplayer, vlc and pulseaudio

#6 2010-01-15 14:27:23

Re: [Solved] Mplayer, vlc and pulseaudio

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