vlc can’t play ANY audio content & parole can’t play mp4 videos on my
Dell Inspiron 15 with 4 x86_64 processors
The laptop was shipped as a win7 machine. I have a collection of downloaded
YouTube videos. Some of which are .webm files which parole can handle. But
a lot of them are older .mp4 videos that I would like to be able to watch
again. I used to like the way parole managed a playlist.pls list of videos
But I found that on leap parole can’t handle mp4 playback:
- {note vlc info below}
parole attempting to play an mp4 file:
additional software is required.
Parole needs MPEG4 AAC decoder to play this file
it can be installed automatically
** Message: PackageKit: xid = 33556106
** Message: PackageKit: desktop_id = (null)
** Message: PackageKit: Codec nice name: MPEG-4 AAC decoder
** Message: PackageKit: ignoring field named level
** Message: PackageKit: ignoring field named base-profile
** Message: PackageKit: ignoring field named profile
** Message: PackageKit: field is: mpegversion, type: gint
** Message: PackageKit: structure: gstreamer1(decoder-audio/mpeg)(mpegversion=4)()(64bit)
** Message: PackageKit: Did not install codec: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.PackageKit was not provided by any .service files
Also I attempted to search for an applicable MPEG-4 AAC decoder
with zypper but failed to find anything that does the job.
So I decided to go with vlc because it can handle both webm and mp4 video files.
Unfortunately on my Dell laptop {which I use for nighttime playback because
I can place it where I can reach the pause and other playback controls from
the recliner I sleep in.} I can NOT get any sound with the pulseaudio device.
It does not matter if I have my external {headphone jack} speakers connected
or fallback on the laptop’s rather tinny built in speakers…
vlc attempting to play ANY video file {video will play but sound fails}:
Audio output failed:
The audio device "default:CARD=PCH" could not be used:
Invalid argument.
I tried manually selecting every single audio device that vlc lists
under audio > audio device:
And none produced any sound output regardless of whether my external
headphone jack speakers were plugged in or not.
Also the choice on that list that refers to alsa always insists that it’s
current default is pulseaudio (which, of course, fails) even if I’ve
already selected the non-default card that alsamixer can make work
as explained in the folowing paragraph. I’m not sure but I think this
problem would be solved if I could change the alsa default to something
other than the pulseaudio device. Though I’d much rather be able to
add a MPEG-4 AAC decoder codec to parole…
But I don’t have a clue how or if I can do either of those???
I note that I have little difficulty using mocp {music on console} to
play my music. Nor is it hard to get sound when I use Google Crome to
stream videos from hulu. Though in both cases to get decent sound from
either I need to enable my “headphone” speakers by opening alsamixer in
a konsole window, selecting the nondefault soundcard and usually unmuting
the headphone channel that feeds my speakers. I also note that using the
above methods Parole has no problem paying the audio content of my .webm
files…
I should probably mention that I don’t actually use KDE. Though I still
like a few kde apps such as Konsole, Yakuake and okular to name a few.
What I do use is openbox. Started via startx from a Konsole after my
user specific environmental variables have been set in my .bashrc.
Can anyone offer any suggestions on how I can playback my mp4 files
(with sound) and preferably from a playlist mixed in with my webm
files? Thanks!