Audio in VDR and KDE suddenly stopped working!!!

[colinjones]

Core has been running for a couple of weeks just fine. Was watching a DVD, when that finished, sometime later we wanted to watch TV. No audio!

I can see on my AV receiver that there is no signal coming in from the SPDIF optical - the PCM light is flashing and there is no channel indication. However, DVDs, CDs and media files all play perfectly! Upto 5.1 or 7.1 channels if the source has it - the AV receiver reflects all this perfectly.

I go to KDE desktop, and same issue - it doesn't make a sound. Run TV in Kaffine, same problem. Rebooting makes no difference. Re-ran the AV wizard, can hear the music and the surround test no problem. Back to LMCE, no sound for KDE or VDR!

I rebuilt the whole system from DVD. Can hear the AV wizard sound, and "Sarah" when she comes up, but still no sound for VDR or KDE, only for DVD, CD and media files....

Can anybody make any suggestions? Please? I'm in a lot of trouble with the other half at the moment! Spending too much time on "that damn thing" caused a fight last night 

[Zaerc]

Bit of an obvious one but have you checked the mixer settings?  And could for some freaky reason the sound be going to another output?

Unfortunately that's all I can think of, sorry to hear about your trouble.

[colinjones]

Where do I find the mixer settings? In alsamixer? I thought they were just levels...... on the DVB card itself?

[Zaerc]

Yes I meant the levels in alsamixer, probably the first thing you looked at. 

It seems strange to me that this problem can survive a re-install, so I'm thinking along the lines of some hardware settings somewhere that were changed.  I don't use SPDIF myself so that's the best I can come up with...  

[colinjones]

Yeah, surviving the reinstall is the bit that confuses me as well. The sound system is obviously working otherwise I wouldn't get any sound from DVDs and media files, as well. I just stumped as to where to start looking on this one! Thanks for the suggestions anyway...

[bulek]

Hi,

maybe not same as in your case, but I had same problems several times. By some strange reason, if you have multiple sound devices in your system, their order gets scrambled and then LMCE always wants to output to the first one. For instance I added web USB camera that also registered sound device, LMCE was trying to output to and my main speakers were silent....

Check your audio devices with cat /proc/asound/cards or something like that....

You can also try to run alsamixer (if you have more cards, then you need to add -c n , where n is number of sound card)...

Regards,

Bulek.

[colinjones]

Thanks for the suggestion Bulek - I don't think I have any other sound devices, I haven't added anything to the system since all the previous builds. The output says:

 0 [NVidia         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
                      HDA NVidia at 0xfe020000 irq 20

So I guess that just means one device...

[darrenmason]

Colin - It might be a hardware problem (with the DVB card). Do you just have the one tuner? If you have another is it failing on that?

Your sound card seems fine (at least with other apps).
When you say it doesn't work in KDE - is that just with TV viewing or also on watching videos, playing MP3's etc?

[colinjones]

In KDE, yes for TV (thru Kaffine) but also doesn't work for basic desktop sounds either - no PCM signal is going to the amp at all. I agree that it would point at the DVB card otherwise, but because the KDE sound doesn't play at login, so ....

Yes there are 2 tuners, but I don't really know how to swap between them in VDR. There is something about which adaptor/card (can't remember exactly) in the VDR menus which I can access if I use vdradmin-am and use the remote control option. But it defaults to 3! So I'm not sure that has anything to do with it...

[colinjones]

As playing media files in LMCE works fine (as do DVDs, CDs) just no sound from KDE and VDR, I tried playing media files on the desktop....


In kaffine sometimes it seems to hang just after starting playback - still no sound, and the amp indicates there is no encoded PCM at all coming out of the core. Also, the volume slider has a mute button at the end of it which I can press on or off, but all the time the icon for it seems to be a cross... is that normal?

In Xine Player on the desktop, it seems to have a problem too. And starts to grind to a halt when I tried playing with some of the settings. Looked at top and it seemed to be sucking up lots of CPU with processes I am not used to seeing, and not sure what they do like kicker...

Tasks: 239 total,   3 running, 235 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 42.9%us, 46.3%sy,  1.2%ni,  9.2%id,  0.0%wa,  0.2%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1804060k total,  1645344k used,   158716k free,     6456k buffers
Swap:  1959888k total,    41956k used,  1917932k free,   674996k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
11704 root      15  -1  123m  41m  15m R   78  2.4   6:08.61 Xorg
 7557 linuxmce  15   0  646m 154m  15m S   28  8.8   0:49.74 xine
15374 linuxmce  15   0  280m 127m  14m S   15  7.2   0:14.95 kicker
15205 linuxmce  15   0  192m  15m  11m S   14  0.9   0:11.11 kded
11794 root      15   0  107m  10m 6848 R   14  0.6   0:10.25 xfwm4
11796 root      15   0  107m 3460 2120 S   12  0.2   0:09.23 xfce-mcs-manage
15372 linuxmce  15   0  148m  14m  10m S   12  0.8   0:10.40 kdesktop
 9109 root      34  19  158m  15m 6792 S    3  0.9   2:16.77 UpdateMedia
14619 root      25   0  195m  58m  19m S    2  3.3   2:11.45 Photo_Screen_Sa
 9787 root      25   0  9276 1584 1080 S    0  0.1   0:15.75 StorageDevices_
    1 root      18   0  3964  840  572 S    0  0.0   0:01.41 init
    2 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.15 migration/0
    4 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.02 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
    6 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.10 migration/1
    7 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.03 ksoftirqd/1
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$