I’ve got two systems that are doing this, and I wonder if anyone else is
seeing it.
Sometime in the past week or two (no longer than that), any mp4 video I
play on either of my two 13.1 systems loses what seems to be the “center
channel” (ie, if it’s a video recorded on a PVR/DVR, I’ll have music and
the laugh track, but the characters’ speech doesn’t come through at all -
or very faintly and heavily “pixelated” - just like on a 5.1 or 7.1
surround system what you get if you disconnect the front center speaker).
I use the PS3 media server, which uses mencoder, and it also loses that
channel if I stream to my tablet.
I see this issue using mplayer and xine, or if I use an embedded player
in Chrome (for example, if I put a clip on Dropbox and play it through
the browser, the audio has cut out). So the video player doesn’t seem to
matter.
If I play the file through my surround sound system on my Raspberry Pi
(running OpenELEC), the audio’s fine.
I’ve reinstalled pulse (and verified the configuration is at default),
and have wiped out my user’s pulseaudio configuration on my desktop (the
first system I noticed the problem on - and that hosts the media server).
This was working fine as of about a week ago, and I don’t see any updates
in my update history that should have affected it. I hadn’t tried it on
my laptop until just today, so it’s possible it has been broken longer
than that.
It’s almost like pulse isn’t remixing to two channels, even though it’s
enabled in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 21:16:55 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 20:59:57 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
>
>> I’ve got two systems that are doing this, and I wonder if anyone else
>> is seeing it.
>
> The command:
>
> speaker-test -c 6 -t wav
>
> definitely shows that the center channel is missing. alsamixer says the
> volume is turned up, though.
Seems to just be the headphones, BTW. Just tried my laptop without the
headphones, and the sound was fine.
Are you saying you haven’t applied any gstreamer or ffmpeg package updates from packman in the last few weeks on 13.1? IIRC some of those are needed for mp4 support.
On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 21:33:24 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 21:16:55 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 20:59:57 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>
>>> I’ve got two systems that are doing this, and I wonder if anyone else
>>> is seeing it.
>>
>> The command:
>>
>> speaker-test -c 6 -t wav
>>
>> definitely shows that the center channel is missing. alsamixer says
>> the volume is turned up, though.
>
> Seems to just be the headphones, BTW. Just tried my laptop without the
> headphones, and the sound was fine.
OK, solved it - and for anyone else using Bose QC2 headphones, if you run
into this, make sure the plug on the headphone end of the connection is
plugged in all the way. If it’s not, you’ll lose the center channel.
On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 21:46:02 +0000, consused wrote:
> Are you saying you haven’t applied any gstreamer or ffmpeg package
> updates from packman in the last few weeks on 13.1? IIRC some of those
> are needed for mp4 support.
>
> PS. Cancel that - just seen your last post.
I’ve actually been doing MP4s on 13.1 since I installed it with no
problems.
No doubt you had (as originally posted), but looking for a problem common to two systems suggested software. You had searched for recent updates that might have caused it, finding nothing relevant. So I mentioned two that get updated fairly often (even more here on Tumbleweed), that might be relevant if updated. Although hardware related was my first thought, headphones as the common factor didn’t trigger from anything - well it was late at night here.
On Wed, 05 Feb 2014 17:16:01 +0000, consused wrote:
> hendersj;2622155 Wrote:
>> On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 21:46:02 +0000, consused wrote:
>>
>> > Are you saying you haven’t applied any gstreamer or ffmpeg package
>> > updates from packman in the last few weeks on 13.1? IIRC some of
>> > those are needed for mp4 support.
>> >
>> > PS. Cancel that - just seen your last post.
>>
>> I’ve actually been doing MP4s on 13.1 since I installed it with no
>> problems.
>>
> No doubt you had (as originally posted), but looking for a problem
> common to two systems suggested software. You had searched for recent
> updates that might have caused it, finding nothing relevant. So I
> mentioned two that get updated fairly often (even more here on
> Tumbleweed), that might be relevant if updated. Although hardware
> related was my first thought, headphones as the common factor didn’t
> trigger from anything - well it was late at night here.
Indeed it did - I had started by looking for recent updates, and the only
common one was libmpg123 (that fell in the timeframe from when it had
worked), but xine doesn’t use it.
I had gone as far as using “rpm -qa --last” on the two machines (because
I hadn’t changed anything on the laptop regarding sound, but I had been
messing around with monitor sinks on the desktop) and comparing the
lists, and using rpm -V to verify the installed RPMs that provide
configuration files.
> Glad you found it.
Me too, though there’s nothing like pulling your hair out for two days
trying to track down a software problem that ended up being hardware. I
even streamed stuff to my tablet and plugged my headphones in there and
it still didn’t register that the headphones were a common part I hadn’t
eliminated from the picture.
