vlc failing to initialise sound output device

SUSE Product Topics SLED Applications
1

Hi all,

After recently updating my SLED 11 SP2 x86-64 installation, vlc can still play video ok but there is no audio no matter what I select under Tools=>Preferences=>Audio=>Output module. I have tried them all. Audio works fine in Skype, firefox etc.

When I double-click a video file I see the following error dialogue from vlc:

“Potential ALSA version problem:
VLC failed to initialize your sound output device (if any).
Please update alsa-lib to version 1.0.23-2-g8d80d5f or higher to try to fix this issue.”

If I launch from the command line I see:

vlc video.mp4 &
VLC media player 1.1.13 The Luggage (revision exported)
Warning: call to srand(1374483747)
Warning: call to rand()
Blocked: call to unsetenv(“DBUS_ACTIVATION_ADDRESS”)
Blocked: call to unsetenv(“DBUS_ACTIVATION_BUS_TYPE”)
[0x6090c0] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use ‘cvlc’ to use vlc without interface.
Blocked: call to setlocale(6, “”)
Warning: call to srand(1374483747)
Warning: call to rand()
Warning: call to srand(1374483747)
Warning: call to rand()
Warning: call to srand(1374483747)
Warning: call to rand()
Warning: call to srand(1374483747)
Warning: call to rand()
Blocked: call to setlocale(6, “”)
Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server socket
jack server is not running or cannot be started
[0x1b15380] jack audio output error: failed to connect to JACK server
[0x1b15380] oss audio output error: cannot open audio device (/dev/dsp)
ERROR: Couldn’t attach to DCOP server!
[0x1a43e00] access_http access error: error: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
[0x1a43e00] access_http access error: error: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
[0x1a43e00] access_mms access error: error: HTTP/1.1 400 Invalid Request

I installed vlc like this:

sudo zypper ar -n ‘packman’ http://packman.mirrors.skynet.be/pub/packman/suse/SLE_11/packman
zypper ref

Downloaded:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/multimedia:/libs/SLE_11_SP2/x86_64/libdvbpsi7-0.2.2-9.1.x86_64.rpm

sudo zypper install libdvbpsi7-0.2.2-9.1.x86_64.rpm
sudo zypper in vlc-gnome
sudo zypper install vlc

How can I get audio to work in vlc?

Many thanks for your help!

Linux localhost 3.0.80-0.7-default #1 SMP Tue Jun 25 18:32:49 UTC 2013 (25740f8) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

2

Such are the perils of third party packages. :wink:

I can’t advise on getting VLC to work, but if your reason for installing VLC was because you need a media player with better codec support than SLED has out of the box, here’s how to get better codec support without mucking around with third party packages: https://www.suse.com/communities/conversations/additional-multimedia-codec-support-for-sled-11-sp3/

3

Using that I got it all working! I am using SP2 so I had to make the following changes:

  1. Changed libstdc++47-devel to libstdc++46-devel in the .spec file.
  2. Disabled the SLED version check in the the build script.

Also, logging out/in only resulted in video files loading but not playing. I had to reboot for it to work properly.

Videos now play as expected with sound in totem, banshee and smplayer,

Great job Mike!

4

[QUOTE=GEKen;14675]I am using SP2 so I had to make the following changes:
[/QUOTE]

Sorry, for some reason I thought you’d updated to SP3, but you didn’t say that anywhere so I don’t know why I thought that. Glad to hear you got it working anyway and thanks for posting what you did to do so.

It’s worth looking at updating to SP3. Updates for SP(N) usually stop about six months after release of SP(N+1).