I recently upgraded my desktop and laptop, which run KDE, and on both systems I noted an extreme volume reduction in all KDE apps (system notifications and Amarok being the most obvious and noticeable). Volume for all other applications (audacious, qmms, aplay, smplayer, etc.) was fine. Since this affected multiple systems and seemed to only affect native KDE apps, I figured it was related to phonon, which had been recently upgraded. However, after doing a little more testing, found that the vlc-2 upgrade as the culprit: when I downgrade VLC to 1.3 and restart KDE, the volume is restored to it's proper level. If I upgrade back to VLC 2 again and restart, the volume is significantly reduced. This is with the phonon-vlc backend (0.4.1). I should also mention here that my mixer levels remained constant throughout - about 85% on my desktop and about 50% on my laptop. So, when I say the volume level dropped, I mean that's based on the expected output at the same mixer level. As noted, other, non-KDE applications continued to work fine, but anything tapping in to phonon dropped in volume significantly. I found a forum thread here, but there was no real resolution other than switching to unstable phonon and related (I prefer to run stable), switching to pulseaudio (which I'm not at all interested in doing), or downgrading to VLC 1.3 (done, but not a good long term solution): http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-920986.html Any ideas what's causing this, or how to fix? I'll be happy to help troubleshoot - just let me know what I can do or what info I can provide. I'm skipping the user 'emerge --info' output for now since this appears to be a pretty widespread problem, but I'll be happy to add it if desired. Thanks.
phonon-4.6.0 and phonon-vlc-0.5.0 are in the tree since several months. Besides bug 406357 (error when cross compiling) I can't see any real showstopper, so probably stabilizing latest phonon/phonon-vlc/phonon-gstreamer releases would be an option? From this blog post (*), phonon-vlc-0.5.0 introduces compatibility with vlc-2. Probably this bug also is just because of the incompatibility between stable (Gentoo) vlc and phonon-vlc? (*) http://apachelog.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/phonon-vlc-0-5-0-and-gstreamer-4-6-0/
*ping*
I see the same problem as Jared and the solution was just upgrading from stable to mentioned testing versions of phonon and phonon-vlc. Funny enough even if compatibility with vlc was introduced with these versions, vlc was loud as normal even after the upgrade, but many other applications like amarok were affected by this bug.
AFAIK the 'problem' is introduced with vlc-2. They changed volume control characteristics from linear to cubic (or sth like this). In my case it not only causes phonon-vlc volume to be much lower than before, but in vlc (gui app) itself it introduces 'oversaturation' noises when volume is set to otherwise nominal 100%. Also some timing problems were observed on my machine with variable-bit-rate ogg files - I observed pitch variations during the playback. Personally I just chose downgrade to vlc-1.x
Since VLC 1.x has now been removed from the tree, is there any official solution to this? If switching to phonon-vlc-5/6 fixes the problem and is the best available solution, can someone promote that to stable?
(In reply to comment #5) > Since VLC 1.x has now been removed from the tree, is there any official > solution to this? If switching to phonon-vlc-5/6 fixes the problem and is > the best available solution, can someone promote that to stable? Have a look at "Depends on:", as long this isnt done you have always the choice to use testing versions.
ahh. Thanks for pointing out the dependency. Completely overlooked that. As for the using test versions, yes, I know, but I feel that Gentoo should provide a solid, working experience by default, which is the stable branch. In this case, that's not currently happening as far as the phonon/vlc integration, which is why I filed the bug report to begin with. I just want to make sure that's not overlooked. :-)
=media-libs/phonon-vlc-0.6.0-r1 stable on all needed arches in bug #431190, old versions removed.
