It was Sunday evening, I was about to sit down for some entertainment. I have my Ubuntu PC connected to the large screen TV as a second display, and the sound piped through the optical SPDIF output to a 5.1 channel sound system. I turned on the TV and sound system. And I fired up the video playback.
Immediately, the sound was stuttering. Rats! I remembered I had this problem since Hardy. Coincidentally, pulseaudio first made it’s appearance in Hardy, so it’s natural to suspect pulseaudio as the source of the problem. Of course, the various sound breakages in Hardy that had since been reported online convinced me I was most likely right.
I could live without watching video on the big screen, so I left it alone then. Now, Intrepid has been released and promised to fix what was broken in Hardy. Except it didn’t for my set-up. So, it was time to get cracking.
The first thing was to check the wiring. It’s funny when you worked for hours fixing something, when the real fault was you forgot to plug the power in. So, I went to the back of the equipment cabinet to poke around. But it was dark back there, so I took out the flash light.
Unfortunately, the flash light was not working. I spent a couple of minutes taking the $2 clunker apart, trying to figure out what’s wrong. But it simply refuse to work. I finally gave up and took out an old flash light out from storage. Which thankfully still works.
So, back to business. The wirings were all checkout out. Next up was the pulseaudio configuration. Some googling led me to here. The HOWTO suggested adjusting “default-fragments” and “default-fragment-size-msec” in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.
I randomly tried a few figures but that didn’t help one bit. At that point, I was almost out of ideas, and was contemplating giving up. But, still I kept at it. Finally, I went back to fiddling with the wiring one more time. By luck, I switched the SPDIF to another input port of the sound system. The original port was marked as CD/MD. I switched it to one marked as DTV. Bang! The problem was solved.
For some unexplained reason, the first port was not able to accept the SPDIF signals properly. I don’t care because now i got perfect sound.
I started up a video on VLC player and switching between stereo and AC3. I played around with the checkbox for “Use SPDIF when available”. It worked! Actually, AC3 through SPDIF from VLC never worked before until now, so I was estatic.
But then, a new problem appeared out of the blue. Suddenly, I could get any sound from the SPDIF unless it’s AC3. Double rats! I have been fiddling with it for two hours now.
I restart the PC, hoping the problem was simply some random bug that would be reset upon reboot. But it didn’t.
I kept at it. Google failed to reveal a solution. I reboot a couple of time, but then the network went out. The PC failed to connect to my home network. Normally, I encountered this problem on almost a daily basis. I have a flaky router, which would refuse to issue the DHCP info about once everyday, and I have to reboot it. But, this wasn’t the cause of the problem this time. The router was fine. But the PC still cannot get the proper IP. I reboot again, but that didn’t solve it. I rechecked the wiring, and found that I must have dislodged the network cable. I set that right, and finally, the network problem was fixed.
Well, the rest of the story was mentioned by yesterday's post. Now, it’s all finally fixed and I hoped I have chased the gremlin out of the house again.
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