opera grabs the sound system on kde (Solved)

[reup]

hello all

I have 3 Gentoo at home all using KDE but having as well other WM installed as backup in case a kde upgrade would go wrong (as it does very often)

one think I noticed is that on all my systems, opera, and opera only, will grab the sound and stop other software from using it

ex : I open opera on youtube (html5 ?) or some video system (flash) and then I try to run a movie with VLS and go to youtube with firefox and play mp3 with clementine

I will only have the sound from opera, if I change page on opera and go to a site with no sound or video, I still cannot hear anything from the other software. until I close opera then reload all other software. then I will hear simultaneously VLS, Firefox and Clementine.

it could be fix by removing opera and using another browser, unfortunately, I do not like changing softwares only because they do not work as intended

any help appreciated


reup
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reup

"Don't wiggle the tail of the frog in the oil of the frying peanuts"

[wcg]

Opera is closed source. You would likely have to go to an Opera
development forum for an answer.

But how many users want to input sound from multiple different
programs at the same time into the kernel's sound system?
The Opera developers are not likely to take this seriously as a bug.

On the other hand, Opera should not leave the kernel's sound
infrastructure locked for itself when Opera or some Opera plug-in
is not actually playing sound (or video with sound), but perhaps
the Opera developers view that as policy rather than as a software
development error ("Web page sounds take precedence over other
sound, so we reserve exclusive access to the sound system when
we start up.")

Perhaps there is an Opera configuration setting to turn that
policy on or off ("I do not want my audio stream from another
program preempted by Opera when it starts up or when it encounters
a URL with an a/v mime type in a www page.") You could ask on an
Opera user's forum. Perhaps some regular user of Opera reading
the forum will know if such a configuration setting exists.
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TIA

[jrussia]

[wcg]

Its not what I think is reasonable that matters, it is what
the Opera developers think (or thought at one time).

I think it could be a legacy configuration from some Windows
BSOD, too, where some version of Windows crashed if anything
used the audio system without locking out access from other
processes. After fixing Opera for that version of Windows,
the developers abstracted it into higher level code in Opera,
so that they could use different lower-level code to reserve
exclusive access to the audio device in different versions
of Windows. (They would not have known when this would
be fixed in Windows, if ever, and what other systems that
Opera was ported to might have the same problem.)

Remember Win9x? It always had "walk and chew gum at
the same time" problems. It would not surprise me if this
code originated in the development of Opera running on Win9x.

That code is probably still in Opera, even on platforms where concurrent
access to the audio device does not crash the system (like linux).

I still think the OP needs to go to the Opera forums to find out
whether this "feature" can be turned on or off, and if so, how
exactly.
_________________
TIA

[reup]

sorry all, I was away for 30 hours

I understand that it would be stupid to have multiple sound running at once, but imagine, you open opera, watch a video, the video is finished, you minimize opera and start to listen music.... except that it works only if you close opera, not only the tab you used for watching the video, but all tabs and the main opera window

I do not try to start a wild chase on opera bugs, I found weird that one browser could highjack the sound system entirely

I was hopping that someone had a hint or encountered this issue before
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reup

"Don't wiggle the tail of the frog in the oil of the frying peanuts"

[wcg]

I am not saying that one would want it to do this, only that the Opera
developers may have had a good reason at one time for having
Opera reserve exclusive access to the audio device. Failure to
disable that functionality for Opera on linux is perhaps a code
maintenance oversight.

The important questions, imho, are whether you can set a configuration
switch in Opera's preferences to prevent it from doing this, if not
will they fix the linux port, etc.
_________________
TIA

[reup]

thanks WCG and JRUSSIA for the replies.

I will close this topic as this is obviously not a gentoo issue
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reup

"Don't wiggle the tail of the frog in the oil of the frying peanuts"

[Kidov]

I'm using KDE4 as well and in my system Opera, Firefox and VLC player can all play audio simultaneously.

[reup]

thanks for the info Kidov

I think I will conduct some other experiment now, like to see if this is working with gnome or lxde

maybe my sound card has some wrong settings.
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reup

"Don't wiggle the tail of the frog in the oil of the frying peanuts"

[franzf]

Do you have pulseaudio running?
Do you have dmix enabled for your default device?
Does your phonon-backend use that default device?

[reup]

I use gstreamer as phonon backend, pulseaudio does not even appear as a choice. In fact, I read on the forum from many people that pulseaudio was more a problem than a solution, that is why I moved out from using it

however, pulseaudio is running :

[reup]

I loose the sound on all my browsers (opera, firefox...) if I use vlc or/and clementine at the same time. in fact, if I start vlc before flashplayer, I do not get sound in flashplayer. if I start flashplayer before vlc, I do not get sound on vlc. it even does not appear in the volume control as a channel

I think I need to restart my sound installation from scratch, I did too many modification to keep tract of what does what
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reup

"Don't wiggle the tail of the frog in the oil of the frying peanuts"

[franzf]

Probably it is enough to set a different ("default", "standard", ...) sound device in vlc (settings->audio).
To get rid of pulseaudio you need to set USE="-pulseaudio" - and hope that there is no application (mostly gnome....) that hard depends on pulseaudio.
Before removing pulseaudio you can try to kill pulse, and remove ~/.pulse dir.

[reup]

solved

I followed again the gentoo wiki on pulseaudio and found the part about pulseaudio and flashplayer

[franzf]

[reup]

thanks Franzf for the clarifications

I have apply the solution now to my 3 gentoo system and all is well

now I can drop Opera
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reup

"Don't wiggle the tail of the frog in the oil of the frying peanuts"

[wcg]

Is pulseaudio maybe started at boot, as a system daemon?

[reup]

nope, I had checked this already, but did it again just in case. the command return nothing, even with the correction (pulseaudio and not pulseaudo )

but ps aux | grep pulse still shows the pulseaudio started systemwide and as Deamon (pulseaudio --system -D )

as my personnal issue is solved, I will keep pulseaudio like this. now I am trying to turn my system to a music studio following http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Music_studio

I believe I will have to start again from scratch because it needs jack and I use dmix

I love problems
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reup

"Don't wiggle the tail of the frog in the oil of the frying peanuts"