RC Upgrade issues

Upgrading the RC viewer from SecondLife-i686-1.22.7.108773 to SecondLife-i686-1.22.8.109366, I found that streaming audio ceased.

the log says:
---
2009-02-06T11:22:44Z INFO: startInternetStream: entered startInternetStream()
2009-02-06T11:22:44Z INFO: startInternetStream: mInternetStreamMedia is now 0xedf1a10
2009-02-06T11:22:44Z INFO: startInternetStream: Starting internet stream: http://scfire-ntc-aa04.stream.aol.com:80/stream/1035/
2009-02-06T11:22:44Z INFO: startInternetStream: Playing.....
----
But netstat reports no such connection and the stream is silent inwoirld. i can use mpg321 to play the stream externally..

Just wondering what changes could have had this effect.

Yes has happened to me too unfortunately. Big audio changes have been introduced, same thing that happened to video, has happened to audio. I think this will effect all 64 bit users, as 32bit gstreamer is required to stream any media now.

Also with the 1.22.8 viewer I have an instant pulseaudio crash, just quits, no warnings, when running this viewer, and causing the viewer to loop sound until it is killed, even then it refuses to quit, and a full system restart was needed to get things back to normal.

If you don't have 64 bit, then maybe you need to install gstreamer?.

Same problem. It also kills my whole system's audio (so I need to restart it, or restart my PC)
When hitting PLAY for the stream music, nothing comes out, when clicking STOP, then it totally freezes SL.
I'm using the slim viewer right now, no choice.

Well all my other sound works fine. UI sounds and other in-world audio effects have no problems. Just streaming. I haven't tested voice because that is prone to other issues - lots of breakups and glitches, mostly bandwidth constraints which i consider normal.

Just the streaming audio.

I posted the same in the RC forum, but thought I'd repeat it here, hoping to get Tofu's attention:

I haven't messed around with RC8 much yet. However, I've played with it long enough to list my initial impression of this release, running on Ubuntu 8.10 Linux (32-bit):

* Voice initially did not work. However, when I went into Prefs and changed the voice device (had been set to OSS for prior versions), voice came right up and worked beautifully! This is the first viewer release where I did not have to make ANY changes to files or use any kind of hacks to get voice working! Well done!

*Sound is overall significantly louder than before, and is now on par with the sound level of my other audio applications (no more having to turn the volume way up to hear things, then have to turn it down again to listen to music offline).

*Texture loading seems to be really snappy!

Edited to add: So far, this version seems to play perfectly well with Pulseaudio! I've quit and restarted the viewer several times already, and have not had a single Pulseaudio crash!


Now for the negatives:

* Streaming music does not work at all. When I press Play on the music tab, nothing happens. SL logs show that a connection was made to the stream, but no such connection exists. Same stream plays fine using an external player.

Edit to add: I just TP'd to another parcel, and streaming music came right up! It appears there's nothing wrong with the viewer after all, and that I need to give my radio on my parcel a good, swift kick! *blushes*

*Streaming media works, at least for a little bit. However, it doesn't take very long before the audio quits and the video stutters badly, as if the buffer was continually being underrun.

If the SL viewer uses buffering for music and media streams, it seems this is now broken.

One odd anomaly I noticed: Sound effects (gestures, particularly) seem to carry a far greater distance than before. I can now clearly hear gestures from avatars well outside of 100m.

Fix the streaming music/media problem, and I think this viewer will be ready for full release! Of course, my outlook may change as I play around with this some more.

Alright, I've hopped from region to region, until my feeties are sore, and no audio stream...
Bonus, I can load the URLs from the log into an external player and use like so.

I've tried exclusively ESD ALSA and OSS.

This is the only problem so far. I think streaming audio may be very much Ubutu/Debian-centric. I use Slackware (KDE+artsd) ... I'm pretty sure this is my issue.

I can only thank my lucky stars that I don't have time to mess with LFS anymore, or I'd proably have to multiboot between Linux distros.. I think it is maybe time to call the client an 'Ubuntu' client instead of a 'Linux client'.

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I have been testing this viewer for a good while, tested in Ubuntu '32 bit' intrepid, and the viewer runs like a dream !!, well until pulseaudio crashes which it does pretty much guaranteed, looping sound and freezing out all system sounds, but seems to run well for about 15 minutes or so.

Kill pulseaudio and thats when the viewer really shows how good it is, it 'just works', media, music, and voice !!.

As suspected with my 64 bit Intrepid the viewer is basically just a viewer, no media, because of the 32/64bit gstreamer issue.

BTW, Yasmin, did you try to install gstreamer?, as its required now.

I'm sure this is a silly question, but - do you have GStreamer 0.10 installed and working? Have you tried it on a GStreamer-specific player, like Totem or MPlayer?

Lastly, are you running a 64-bit build? 64-bit GStreamer is known to not work with SL.

If worst came to worse, would you be adverse to switching to a Debian-based distro? There's lots of reasons I prefer a Debian-based distro, such as the ease of installing .deb packages, automatic dependency resolution, and so on.

Okay, so far I have used RC8 for several hours, running through sims of varying loads, ranging from my quiet sky-sandbox to a busy nightclub, and I am very happy with the performance of this version. Frames-per-second generally stayed between 20 and 40, textures loaded up refreshingly fast, and audio was stable. In fact, as a neat surprise, I could even see the title and artist of whatever song was playing in my streaming music when I had my Pulseaudio Manager window open and on the "devices" tab! Nice!

I have not had a chance to dig deeper into the streaming media issue I reported earlier, but will try again on a different parcel with different media streams soon.

I did encounter one ugly problem, however. It seems that, like the "experimental" viewer, if I start SL and then shut it down again without logging in, SL freezes and Pulseaudio crashes. SL unfreezes and exits when I "killall -9 pulseaudio". Since this only seems to happen if the viewer is shut down while not being logged in, it's not a show-stopper, but could become really annoying if there's server-side login failures such as we experienced a couple of weeks ago. At any rate, there is definitely a race condition somewhere in the code that needs to be found and squashed.

Well, Kath
I'd hate for this to turn into a religious debate, but I'll venture as to why Ubuntu is one of my very last options for distribution choice.

firstly
Yes, I have a full Gnome suite installed. Gstreamer etc. are all here.
Although I also have Slamd64 on this machine I use it exclusively for work-related purposes.

My biggest reason for not running Ubuntu is its dependency on "house" patches. Not even a standard kernel will work well, even when it compiles on a .deb distro. I much prefer the configure, make, install procedure from clean Gnu sources for my homebrew. t means the ability to download any clean source from anywhere and compiling it successfully "out of the box" and having it work.

To me, this is the essence for Linux being an alternative to proprietary OS.

I really like the efficiency of 22.8 and prefer it over the stable viewer, and for now I get past the stream issue by grabbing the url from the log and and playing it externally.

Oh and I think you ma have a point about gstreamer:
---
grab_gst_syms:81: Found DSO: libgstreamer-0.10.so.0
grab_gst_syms:22: Failed to grab symbol: _gst_debug_register_funcptr
grab_gst_syms:23: Failed to grab symbol: _gst_debug_category_new
grab_gst_syms:94: Found DSO: libgstaudio-0.10.so.0
grab_gst_syms:108: Found DSO: libgstvideo-0.10.so.0
grab_gst_syms:133: Failed to find necessary symbols in GStreamer libraries.
startup:184: Couldn't find suitable GStreamer 0.10 support on this system - video playback disabled.
---

Also tested for a while on both 64 bit and 32 bit Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, my thoughts on 64 bit are true it seems, no media at all now, unless I go with a 64 bit viewer, and experience a severe pulseaudio crash, simply starting the viewer.

However, in 32 bit, the viewer runs like a dream !!, everything works, although, pulseaudio doe's crash, guaranteed 1-15 minutes into the session. The pulseaudio crash is not as severe and can be killed easily and restarted, although it may be a real 'turn off' for people into there first few days of linux in SL, as all system sounds are replaced by a constant looping sound, of the last few seconds before the pulseaudio crash.

It also works without pulseaudio running at all, which is great for some, and of course without pulseaudio it runs without issues.

EDIT:

With voice disabled viewer is VERY stable with pulseaudio running, only on 32bit, all media working well, audio and video !!.

I can respect that. One of Linux' greatest strengths is its diversity. Everyone has the freedom to have exactly the setup they want, even if it means rolling their own.

As for the GStreamer errors - although you didn't specifically mention it, it sounds like you're running a 64-bit system.

I wonder if there's a way to kludge 32-bit libraries into the thing...

The new RC, 1.22.8.109366, is causing me the troubles others have reported--running it kills off sound (if I totally crank the volume, I hear a very short sound being played endlessly), and I have to reboot to get it back. Running 64-bit Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, gstreamer 0.10.21-3.

This may well be a bug in whatever 32-bit compatibility libraries the SL client is using, but in any case I hope that eventually there's a 64-bit SL client.

Running Gentoo w/o Portaudio, and so far so good... except that MP3 streaming cra-shes the viewer. going for a bug report!

Hi,

with a debian Lenny "out of the box", voice work fine with the new 1.22.8.109366. With Alsa.

The only thing that I've seen, it's un instanbility (crashes), when I attempt to reduce the SL's client in the task bar.

I beg you perdon for my bad inglish (french or spanish, better)

Bye-bye

Alain P.

Okay! Uncommenting LL_BAD_OPENAL_DRIVER=x in the secondlfe script, fixes my streaming audio.
Thanks for the pointer to the Jira entry.
I'm not bothered with streaming vid media, as my bandwidth constraints make it a pain anyway.

Oh for the record:
Mainboard: GA-946GCM-S2C
CPU: Pentium D
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 7300LE (512) (Driver: NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.22)

Slackware 12.2
Kernel 2.6.28 SMP homebuilt
Gnome 2.22

Thanks!

I think I have a 'fix' for this - it will likely be in viewer 1.23.

WTG, baby!

I found that replacing the supplied libopenal.so.1, with the following version that I have used previously, eliminates the pulseaudio crash.

http://dune2.dyndns.org/projects/pulseaudio/openal-soft/libopenal.so.1

I have to choose OSS, although pulseaudio is saved from crashing so badly, future connections made to the voice service may or may not connect after a teleport etc., a workaround for that is to disable and re-enable voice in preferences.

32 bit tested only so far.

EDIT:

Pulseaudio did crash, but was running for about 4 hours no problem, restarted pulseaudio and all seems to be ok again, no immediate crashes as before.

...and, man, is it ugly!

Okay. Some of you may recall how I've been complaining about how SLVoice likes to cause Pulseaudio to hang, roll over, and die, usually at the instant it tries to make a connection to voice while entering the world. Well, I finally pinpointed the problem. It wasn't SLVoice nor any of the Vivox libraries. It was OpenAL.

This is what has led me to this conclusion: Before RC8, the only time Pulseaudio ever crashed on me was when I had voice enabled. Strangly, it would only happen when making a connection to voice for the first time during the session, and more often than not, happened while still trying to enter the world. My workaround was to log in with voice disabled, and then go in and enable it after everything else was stable. This generally worked, although sometimes it would still hang Pulseaudio the instant voice tried to connect.

Now, with RC8 and RC9, Pulseaudio no longer crashes when entering the world. Now, it usually waits until I have been in-game for a while (and usually at a time when crashing is LEAST desirable), and now it doesn't matter if voice is enabled or not. Even worse, when Pulseaudio does hang, it prevents the viewer from being able to exit properly, forcing me to enter these commands whenever Pulse hangs:

killall -9 pulseaudio (issuing this causes the viewer to instantly hang. Otherwise viewer hangs when trying to exit).
killall -9 SLVoice
killall -9 do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin
pulseaudio

The difference: Before, only SLVoice was using OpenAL. The viewer itself was using fmod. And there seems to have been enough separation between the viewer and SLVoice that an SLVoice/Pulseaudio crash didn't take the viewer with it. But with RC8 and later, both SLVoice and the viewer are using OpenAL, and now a Pulseaudio crash brings the entire thing to a grinding halt, as multiple processes end up in a futex_wait race condition.

Now here's where the problem is: I've done a lot of reading, trying to get under the hood of this problem. And it seems that pulseaudio hangs are common with OpenAL-based games. OpenAL is not Pulseaudio-aware, and by the looks of the Openal-soft project, may never be. It seems OpenAL is trying to directly access ALSA, cannot get exclusive access, and ALSA punts it to Pulseaudio. Pulseaudio tries to work with it, but it seems OpenAL is kicking and screaming the whole way. In a few extreme cases, I noted that, during one of my SL sessions, OpenAL initiated and killed 1,034 sinks in Pulseaudio Manager inside of five seconds, causing Pulseaudio to have allocated a total of 3.2GB of memory. Yeah, this is not good. Thank God for swap!

I have seen a few suggestions around the internet for taming the OpenAL beast, ranging from forcing OSS (which I had been doing before RC, to using ESD, and some sort of voodoo about kludging the system to use SDL.

Now, since I'm on the subject, I am curious as to why I need two different OpenAL libraries in my system? I already have one in /usr/libs, and SL forces me to maintain one in Second Life's /lib directory as well. Why is that? And could this be part of the problem?

I'm going to continue trying to poke away at this problem and hope that I can come up with the ultimate solution to OpenAL's problem with Pulseaudio.