I am now very confused, with pulse, alsa, phonon, gstreamer etc etc
Can someone point me to some where that has nice simple pictures that
explain how this all works !!!
Ta
Mal
Do you actually have a problem or is this a general question.
If you have an issue with sound. Tell us if you use kde or gnome and take a look at this:
SDB:Audio troubleshooting - openSUSE
Well, I do have a problem ( see ‘Flash NFS and Gstreamer/Xine’ now on page 2 ) however since
no one else seem to have this problem or an answer I thought if I knew what the heck was
going on I might be able to figure it out 
I have discovered that ( in respect to the previously posted question ) if I remove the gstreamer
phonon backend and use VLC everything works but I have no idea why.
best wishes
Mal
PS I seem to be suffering from finger trouble while typing the thread title as well as sound confusion
I have no idea either
Use what works
In your other post you mention xine? Is functionality limited with xine too?
Doesn’t it really rot your soul if you fix a problem and you don’t know why what you did fixed it ?
Changing the backend of phonon seems to make no difference whatsoever
however there is a page I found that says xine backend is now unmaintained.
The preferred seems to be vlc or gstreamer - opensuse 11.4 only put gstreamer on
by default but there are a whole bunch available
Mal
I’m using gstreamer
I also have xine (which also works)
With ‘stand alone’ machines gstreamer works fine for me too. It all goes pear shaped
when I have a machine with nfs4 home directories and ldap authentication. I
am currently guessing it’s permissions somehow as the users isn’t a member
of any ‘machine local’ groups. I don’t what rights gstreamer needs when it
interacts with kde … hence question 2. Using vlc as a phonon backend works
fine so I can do that but it bugs me that I don’t know why the ‘out of the box’
setup doesn’t work, and it also only seems to go wrong with kde 4.6.4 and
nvidia graphics cards with hdmi sound out.
Mal
I know of no sites with simple pictures explaining how it works.
Here is a link to a page I previously wrote a few years back (its been moved back and forth a few times during the wiki update process since) : SDB:Sound concepts - openSUSE
Many thanks
Mal