No sound in Open Office Impress, openSUSE 11.1

[dimesio]

Sound works fine in everything else (Amarok, Kaffeine, Flash, Skype, even Windows apps running in Wine), but I cannot get any sound whatsoever in Open Office Impress (tried both 3.0 and 3.1).

I am using KDE 3.5.10 with ALSA 1.0.18-8.12.1. I uninstalled PulseAudio when I first installed 11.1 (except for libpulse0). Does Impress require PulseAudio? (If so, I'll just live without sound in it.) If that's not it, any ideas what else I should look at?

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by dimesio

Sound works fine in everything else (Amarok, Kaffeine, Flash, Skype, even Windows apps running in Wine), but I cannot get any sound whatsoever in Open Office Impress (tried both 3.0 and 3.1).

I am using KDE 3.5.10 with ALSA 1.0.18-8.12.1. I uninstalled PulseAudio when I first installed 11.1 (except for libpulse0). Does Impress require PulseAudio? (If so, I'll just live without sound in it.) If that's not it, any ideas what else I should look at?

No Impress does not require pulse audio. At least I do not think it does. I think it should work with pulse and without pulse (but I'm not certain). On my 32-bit and 64-bit openSUSE-11.1 PCs, I have sound working for some power point presentations with Impress, and not with other presentations. I do not know enough about this to explain why it works with some, and not with others.

I have never tried to create a custom slide presentation (with sound) in Impress, but given sound works for me in Impress, I suppose it is possible.

My 83-year old mother received many power point presentations from friends, with sound in the back ground. Most of these presentations are tastefully done, but unfortunately the sound playback from these Power point presentations in Impress works unreliably, plus to launch Impress from Hot Mail requires a number of mouse clicks/files to be saved, and is not user friendly for an 83-year old grandma. I also discovered the main reason why she was booting to WinXP about 1/2 the time (instead of to openSUSE-11.1 Linux all the time) was because Linux would not reliably play back with sound the power point presentations.

In the end, I "bit the bullet" and installed under wine the legally free application "Microsoft Power Point viewer 2007" and then wrote a small script such that it is launched easily when the power point presentation is a Hot Mail email attachment. The thread is here: User friendly viewing Power Point presentations in Linux ? - openSUSE Forums

This is most likely NOT the answer you were looking for, but its all I have to offer.

Hopefully someone else can chime in and explain what you need to do for Impress.

[dimesio]

I already have Powerpoint 2003 and 2007 installed in Wine. Powerpoint's builtin sound effects work, but inserted sound files don't. But that's a Wine problem. My concern is why sound doesn't work at all in native Open Office.

My understanding is that openSUSE uses the Go-oo build, which uses gstreamer, and multimedia is supposed to work out of the box. Is that correct? I do have gstreamer installed, but not all the plugins. Any idea which one I might try?

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by dimesio

I already have Powerpoint 2003 and 2007 installed in Wine. Powerpoint's builtin sound effects work, but inserted sound files don't. But that's a Wine problem. My concern is why sound doesn't work at all in native Open Office.

Hmmm ... I do not have the commercial Power Point 2003 nor 2007 (that requires money to buy) running under wine. Rather I have the legally free Power Point Viewer 2007 running under wine, and sound DOES work for Power Point Viewer 2007 running under wine for .pps files. The wine HQ article is out of date here.

Originally Posted by dimesio

IMy understanding is that openSUSE uses the Go-oo build, which uses gstreamer, and multimedia is supposed to work out of the box. Is that correct? I do have gstreamer installed, but not all the plugins. Any idea which one I might try?

While I have the packman packaged gstreamers installed, I am not aware of one application that I use that uses them. Instead I use the xine engine, or in some cases direct to the ALSA API.

As I already noted, sound does work in Impress for me for some Power Point presentations and not for others. I have not tried to create a presentation with audio (with Impress).

Hence sorry, I can't answer your questions. Perhaps someone else can chime in please ??

[dimesio]

oldcpu: Thanks for your advice, but Powerpoint Viewer won't help me. I want to create presentations with sound and video, not just play them.

I ran ooimpress from the terminal, and here's the output from creating a new presentation, adding a sound transition from Impress's list of built-in sounds, and trying to play it:

dimesio@linux-rtpv:~> ooimpress
dimesio@linux-rtpv:~> ** Message: don't know how to handle audio/x-wav

I suspect I'm missing something (plug-in, library, setting somewhere), but I have no idea where to look.

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by dimesio

oldcpu: Thanks for your advice, but Powerpoint Viewer won't help me. I want to create presentations with sound and video, not just play them.

I ran ooimpress from the terminal, and here's the output from creating a new presentation, adding a sound transition from Impress's list of built-in sounds, and trying to play it:

dimesio@linux-rtpv:~> ooimpress
dimesio@linux-rtpv:~> ** Message: don't know how to handle audio/x-wav

I suspect I'm missing something (plug-in, library, setting somewhere), but I have no idea where to look.

I do not know what sound server/daemon impress uses. Perhaps you could check in to that. If it uses oss then ensure you have alsa-oss installed (if a 32-bit pc) and in addition alsa-oss-32bit (if a 64-bit pc)

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by oldcpu

I do not know what sound server/daemon impress uses. Perhaps you could check in to that. If it uses oss then ensure you have alsa-oss installed (if a 32-bit pc) and in addition alsa-oss-32bit (if a 64-bit pc)

Further to this, did you try different audio file types as the Impress input? ie try .wav in addition to trying .mp3 ?

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by oldcpu

Further to this, did you try different audio file types as the Impress input? ie try .wav in addition to trying .mp3 ?

I have to run off to a social function ... But I just read Impress supports only .wav, .aif, and .au formats. So ensure you input a supported format.

[dimesio]

My system is 32 bit, and I have alsa-oss installed. The terminal output I posted was from trying a .wav file.

[dimesio]

Well, trying mp3s produced a slightly different error message in the terminal--the mimetype it complained about was "application/x-id3"--and googling that led me to an answer on Ubuntu Launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...rg/+bug/375891

The plugin that needs to be installed is gstreamer-0_10-plugins-good. Audio works fine now, including mp3s.

oldcpu: I think the limitation on formats you mentioned applies to the original Open Office, not the Go-oo build that openSUSE and Ubuntu use. But thanks for reminding me to try different formats, because it did lead me to the solution.