Unable to play concurrent audio while streaming audio/video in browser or otherway

English Multimedia
1

Hi,

I am unable to stream audio in browser when device is in use by mediaplayer. When I use audio/video in browser my audio fails in other applications. I have tried several combinations by enabling/disabling pulseaudio, created various .asoundrc but nothing has worked. Every time I need to use audio output from other application I need to close the earlier application; which is very frustrating.

My hardware, codec & playback device details are as follows -

# lspci -nn | grep -i audio
00:01.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Trinity HDMI Audio Controller [1002:9902]
00:14.2 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH Azalia Controller [1022:780d] (rev 01)

# head -n 1 /proc/asound/card0/codec*
Codec: ATI R6xx HDMI

# aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: 92HD87B2/4 Analog [92HD87B2/4 Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

I don’t know what to do here.

2

You could start informing us which version of openSUSE you use and which desktop environment. :wink:

3

Right…

# uname -a
Linux chigurh.mydomain.com 3.11.10-21-desktop #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jul 21 15:28:46 UTC 2014 (9a9565d) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I use default KDE Desktop Environment.

4

When you do not know which openSUSE version (or even which Linux ditribution and version):

cat /etc/os-release

The above only reveals the version of the kernel, wich may help in finding out which version of openSUSE this is most probably, but not 100% (and it requires extra thinking of the addressees.).

5

My bad, I am using 13.1 -

# cat /etc/os-release
NAME=openSUSE
VERSION="13.1 (Bottle)"
VERSION_ID="13.1"
PRETTY_NAME="openSUSE 13.1 (Bottle) (x86_64)"
ID=opensuse
ANSI_COLOR="0;32"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:opensuse:opensuse:13.1"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.opensuse.org"
HOME_URL="https://opensuse.org/"
ID_LIKE="suse"
6

Ok You should be using pulse audio which then should merge audio streams.

Either some app is going direct to the hardware and thus blocking other streams or pulse is not configured.

First step is to go to yast-sound device and check to see the pulse is active ( bottom right button)

7

I have pulseaudio enabled but no joy.

8

Hmmm what browser and what mediaplayer and what desktop

You might want to install pavucontrol it might give a clue since it allows control for every sound producing app an app that does not show up is probably going straight to the dev file and blocking access

9

I am using Mozilla Firefox-ESR, There is pavucontrol installed, I checked all settings there. The sound works concurrently among various desktop media players such as Amarock, VLC, Xine, etc but not with browser/s.

10

Sorry I have no clue. It sounds like the browsers are trying to use the /dev directly thus blocking others. But I don’t know why it would do that. :stuck_out_tongue: It works fine here :X

11

It is frustrating. Every time when I need alternate audio output with other applications I get this issue and need to terminate the previous application. If audio device is busy with vlc I cant stream any flash video-audio in browser; it says plugin crash. I believe this got to do with AMD/ATI HDA module.

12

Guess it could be I have a NVIDIA card But really if pules is working that is the fellow that is supposed to merge streams it really should not depend on the hardware or hardware drivers.

.