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Adarion Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 22 Aug 2005 Posts: 78
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Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2015 6:22 pm Post subject: var. problems w. VLC ffmpeg libav [partially solved] |
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tl;dr:
1. all sorts of problems with no video playback on VLC (or others), libav does work neither in amd64 nor ~amd64 with 90% of packages. ffmpeg based builds no good, vlc seems to rely way too much on these kind of libs. Other projects also seem to be troubled with ffmpeg releases (or libav).
2. adobe-flash grabs alsa device and stops pulseaudio (or probably other sound systems) from playback (besides that adobe-flash is sheer terror but still needed in the web)
Hello guys
I feel a little lost.
intro tl;dr: Gentoo is fine, I love it for many years now but I am at the end of my wit currently.
intro:
I have been using Gentoo now for... iirc. about 10 years. So far I was mainly fine with it.
There were some nasty happenings like API/ABI breaks on certain libs that forced me to rebuild 80% of my system (libpng anyone? poppler, icu, boost...?). But more or less I went through it with a lot of compile time on my 8+ systems (also very old ones) where I run Gentoo. But it was the distribution that always helped me to get things to run even on ... questionable hardware where even installers of others would fail. Maximum of individualization, all about choice, lots learned and rather performant system.
I got around to be at booths on local Linux conferences for Gentoo. I was quite happy with it. I even managed my first amd64/x86 multilib switch recently and this actually caused wonders (mesa on a Kabini system, before it was emul and 32bit performance was horrible, now it is near-fluid).
But now I am at the end of skills, but also patience. Currently I am very stressed with my PhD work (has nothing to do with IT, Linux or anything). But I need the computer(s) daily and fully functional.
1. vlc / ffmpeg / libav
There one issue is libav vs. ffmpeg vs. everything else that plays or somehow processes video. I guess most of that is to blame on this childish upstream quarrel between ffmpeg and libav.
But did anybody notice the degradation of quality when it came to video playback? I admit I partially (have to) mix ~amd64 and amd64 on my system(s) since I run it also on recent hardware or I just need a lot of functions and bugfixes (e.g. libreoffice handling that pesky OOXML docx colleagues send me). But vlc somehow stopped playing more and more video formats, DVDs were lately just single image and sound, things got buggy and crashy and sometimes trying video playback would even cause HW freezes (!) that were beyond REISUB (!).
Now there seemed to be a sudden switch to libav caused by virtual/ffmpeg and I seemed to find no way around it. So well, why not libav? I personally wouldn't mind. Things weren't great with ffmpeg lately anyway.
No video player would play back anything really so I thought it might be nice to switch to libav and see how things turn out.
After a lot of troubles with dependencies, a lot of #" emerge -C " I managed to get media-video/libav-9.17 onto the system. Recompiling things but then... of course a lot of programs were not satisfied. VLC wanted latest libav possible in tree. So again, but with unmasked and ~amd64 libav. It finally went, even VLC compiled with it (-ffmpeg -postproc).
I finally could play back DVDs again.
But no single mp4 style file. It was total garbage.
Rebuilding things besides vlc now with this media-video/libav-11.2 caused 90% of builds to fail. Also I found a good bunch of programs that forced ffmpeg back through dependencies.
So now I have nothing working (besides DVD playback on VLC) but nothing else. Reverting back to ffmpeg will result in similar problems.
I even had to resort to using Windows for certain tasks, imagine that!
I have the impression that both projects, libav AND ffmpeg are currently a pile of steaming crap. VLC is quickly to follow, they also had flakey releases on W32 where they bundle most stuff in their precompiled binary.
Does anybody have a solution to this mess or does anybody know if the developers of both projects are going to shake hands again and just cooperate and get things back to stable and working?
2. adobe-flash vs. alsa / pulseaudio
One other issue is that I thoght about running pulseaudio on one system to see if it would help some sound troubles. It seemed at first, though kmix barely shows anything much to regulate. (I thought gnome projects and kde should work well with each other by now)
But then it seems adobe-flash (don't tell me, I know!) grabs the sound card directly on alsa level (bypassing pulseaudio?) and blocks the device. So whenever flash is in memory (not even actively playing) it gets a hold of sound and blocks everything else. It is 2015, and my computer behaves like 1993 and prior (DOS, single task, I have been there). I know adobe-flash is a pest and an unfixable blob. But still, isn't there any solution to this mess?
Or did I misconfigure something?
Flash also has no video accel, regardless of my mms.cfg on the free amd driver stack. Even moving the mouse cursor causes the video to stutter. Does anybody have real life experience with gnash or lightspark? (Are these 2 projects still alive at all?)
Sorry for the long text.
PS: I have currently several systems with similar problems so I didn't want to spam here with emerge --info and other specs right away. _________________ stop tcpa, swpatents, corrupt politicians and other scary stuff
Last edited by Adarion on Mon Feb 23, 2015 9:31 am; edited 1 time in total |
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SDNick484 Apprentice
Joined: 05 Dec 2005 Posts: 231
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Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2015 7:09 pm Post subject: |
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Adarion,
We are in very similar boats and I feel your pain. For the libav/ffmpeg issue, my solution as of this week is to throw a general "-libav" into my make.conf and rebuild with a -N. This change let me rebuild everything cleanly on a pure ~amd64 system. I haven't tried VLC, but my usual media players (mplayer & mpv) seem to work fine. To be fair to Gentoo, the real issue seems to have been caused upstream (a great comparison of ffmpeg & libav and some history is here). Your specific issue sounds very similar to danomac's post on page 5 of this thread so I'm inclined to think that dropping libav will indeed fix your issue.
As for the adobe-flash, I'm not actually seeing the issue that you're facing. I'm (unfortunately) using pulse, and multiple audio streams work fine (I tested by playing a youtube video in flash then starting a mp3 in mplayer and both audio streams were playing simultaneously. If it matters, I'm using alsa from the kernel and I am not using any other mixer (i.e. no jack, kmix, etc.). |
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229566 Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 16 Aug 2010 Posts: 127
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Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2015 8:20 pm Post subject: |
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SDNick484 wrote: | To be fair to Gentoo, the real issue seems to have been caused upstream |
Well, let's be fair completely through and say it is Gentoo's fault, for defaulting to a half-baked quasi-fork that should've been hard masked, and that exists purely for political reasons because some devs are acting like children.
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Schnulli Guru
Joined: 25 Jun 2010 Posts: 320 Location: Bremen DE
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Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2015 12:50 am Post subject: |
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vlc / ffmpeg / libav works pretty fine if you have the correct flags and useflags and also use an older ffmpeg Version, thats all, create your own package.mask file, test it by ur own what works, usually on KDE and Gnome it works kinda different, i prefer to use XFCE4 Profile Set3 (Desktop)
Sort the flags out and usually it works.
Listen, here, for me, ffmpeg , libav and VLC work pretty fine !
Lets get it working again for you and keep you going on beeing a Gentoo-nian
Regards |
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Adarion Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 22 Aug 2005 Posts: 78
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Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2015 9:30 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for the comforting words. Of course I'll stay with Gentoo, even though there are some days... you know. When upstream messes up and Gentoo maintainers still pull in that stuff. Okay, sometimes it is inevitable.
And yes, I had already read this
https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FFmpeg-versus-Libav
It's a good summary.
So I "emerge -C"ed libav, virtual/ffmpeg and vlc.
And then downgraded everything to amd64 and pulled in old ffmpeg + old vlc and recompiled lots of things. Now things work again, finally (so obviously there was a reason for this ancient versions to be the "stable" amd64 ones). The downside is: No VDPAU and several other improvements missing.
If I had the time I might feel tempted to check where the regressions came in. But I do not have the time sadly.
I also noticed that audacious uses less memory when compiled without any ffmpeg USE flags but then it doesn't play WAV files anymore. *sigh*
For the adobe crap I have yet to find a solution (might try lightspark / gnash again but those haven't seen updates for years). On a different box without pulseaudio it seems to be in coexistence, but there everything is using alsa directly. But that issue is more a severe nuisance than a real blocker. _________________ stop tcpa, swpatents, corrupt politicians and other scary stuff |
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Schnulli Guru
Joined: 25 Jun 2010 Posts: 320 Location: Bremen DE
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Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2015 11:37 am Post subject: |
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if it works now.....
Well, my thoughts....
Let Windows 10 be released this year and see if somewhere later, when MS 10 is out, someone out of the blue will recompile the one and other app that works on Linux and Gentoo again so smoothy we expect.... lets see
Can it be???? |
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mimosinnet l33t
Joined: 10 Aug 2006 Posts: 713 Location: Barcelona, Spain
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Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2015 12:44 am Post subject: Re: var. problems w. VLC ffmpeg libav [partially solved] |
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Adarion wrote: | But now I am at the end of skills, but also patience. Currently I am very stressed with my PhD work (has nothing to do with IT, Linux or anything). But I need the computer(s) daily and fully functional.
[...]
PS: I have currently several systems with similar problems so I didn't want to spam here with emerge --info and other specs right away. |
I have arrived to this thread because the issues with vlc, ffmpeg and libav. I am using gentoo in many systems (home, work, old laptops, servers,...), and I have also been caught in the middle of a broken upgrade, leaving some boxes temporarily unusable. What I do nowadays is to have a binhost, and upgrade the boxes after having the binhost (chroot in a modern machine) upgraded.
In my case, the issue has been solved having consistent use flags due to the change from libav to ffmpeg as a default (news: 2015-04-16-ffmpeg-default)
Cheers! _________________ Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved.
Take care of the community answering unanswered posts. |
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