Bug 586159

Summary: Phonon does not work in KDE 4.4 packages
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.3 Reporter: T. J. Brumfield <enderandrew>
Component: KDE4 WorkspaceAssignee: E-mail List <kde-maintainers>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Critical    
Priority: P5 - None CC: coolo, ctrippe, forgotten_jepjs6w6nS, forgotten_kHYb7eJGnH, jnelson-suse, krange
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86   
OS: openSUSE 11.3   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description T. J. Brumfield 2010-03-07 22:27:19 UTC 
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6

I've tried on 3 different computers in my house with openSUSE 11.2 and openSUSE 11.3 (Milestone 2) packages. In each, I have working audio with KDE 4.3. In each, the moment I upgrade to KDE 4.4, Phonon refuses to initialize my on-board
sound. I've tried both Xine and Gstreamer back ends. In each instance, I can get audio working from the command line with alsa speaker tests, and Yast speaker tests. But Phonon is not working.

I've tried troubleshooting this for about two weeks, soliciting help in the openSUSE forums, #kde and #opensuse irc channels. No suggestion from anyone could get Phonon working. I've simply had to roll back to KDE 4.3 packages.

For a specific instance here, on this particular laptop, the sound is running on a nVidia Corporation MCP67 High Definition Audio chipset with the snd_hda_intel driver and a 2.6.31 kernel. I did try a 2.6.33 kernel with the
openSUSE 11.3 packages.

I have also opened a bug with KDE.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229885

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install KDE 4.4 packages on openSUSE 11.2 or 11.3
2. Try to play any sound, including startup sound
3. Watching Phonon fail to initialize
Actual Results:  
Phonon always fails to initialize on all three computers I've tested (different sound chipsets) on x86 and x86_64, with both Gstreamer and Xine backends tested.

Expected Results:  
Working sound
Comment 1 T. J. Brumfield 2010-03-07 22:30:06 UTC 
Someone on the forums mentioned they had the same problem, but could get audio working again with the following command:

rcalsasound restart

But they had to do this with every reboot.
Comment 2 Jon Nelson 2010-03-23 17:08:05 UTC 
The above doesn't really work for me.
I'm on opensuse 11.2 running the KDE 4.4 "Factory" desktop.
And when I was with 4.3.whatever everything worked.
When I went to 4.4 phonon started misbehaving and now sound no longer works.
Other apps which use pulseaudio/alsa work fine - just KDE apps don't work.

I've tried switching back and forth among the gstreamer and xine backends without luck.

Also, KDE 4.4 includes a native pulseaudio backend- I filed a bug about this already - but it is not enabled!  A simple BuildRequires in the phonon specfile would probably eliminate 90% of the sound issues people have with kde.
Comment 3 T. J. Brumfield 2010-03-23 17:38:44 UTC 
rcalsasound restart didn't end up working for me on any of the boxes I tested. However, I was able to fix the issue by replacing the openSUSE default packages with ones from Packman. However, that doesn't change the fact that the default openSUSE packages still appear to be broken.

(In reply to comment #2)
> The above doesn't really work for me.
> I'm on opensuse 11.2 running the KDE 4.4 "Factory" desktop.
> And when I was with 4.3.whatever everything worked.
> When I went to 4.4 phonon started misbehaving and now sound no longer works.
> Other apps which use pulseaudio/alsa work fine - just KDE apps don't work.
> I've tried switching back and forth among the gstreamer and xine backends
> without luck.
> Also, KDE 4.4 includes a native pulseaudio backend- I filed a bug about this
> already - but it is not enabled!  A simple BuildRequires in the phonon specfile
> would probably eliminate 90% of the sound issues people have with kde.
Comment 4 Jon Nelson 2010-03-23 17:40:32 UTC 
Which packages did you replace?
Comment 5 T. J. Brumfield 2010-03-23 17:47:11 UTC 
Yast now has a feature where you can switch all packages to a given repository, so I let Packman overwrite all the openSUSE packages. However, I believe the relevant packages here are probably the phonon backend engines. I don't think Packman provides the Qt/phonon base packages, but they do provide gstreamer and xine engines.
Comment 6 Stephan Kulow 2010-06-17 11:00:48 UTC 
has this been sorted out?
Comment 7 T. J. Brumfield 2010-06-17 14:27:24 UTC 
I've done some more openSUSE installs and had this same problem on even more hardware.

Normally, I just allow the Packman repositories to overwrite the broken ones in the main openSUSE repositories. But with this last install I wanted to find another solution.

I tried adding my user account to the audio group, and then the stock Phonon packages started working.

However, the installer does not add the audio group by default.
Comment 8 Forgotten User kHYb7eJGnH 2010-07-01 08:46:13 UTC 
info provided
Comment 9 Kevin Range 2010-08-06 16:04:14 UTC 
I am seeing this same behavior in 11.3 final.
Comment 10 Forgotten User jepjs6w6nS 2010-09-14 17:01:42 UTC 
Confirm it on 11.3 final x86_64
Comment 11 Jon Nelson 2011-08-04 16:21:21 UTC 
openSUSE 11.4 and KDE 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7 seem to work fine.

Can this be closed?
Comment 12 Christian Trippe 2012-01-28 14:05:36 UTC 
.