Help Needed With Streaming Audio & Video - Debian Linux

Hi Folks,

I'm in the process of completely switching from Windows to Linux and now I tried the Linux Viewer for the first time...

Ok, here's what I'm using:
Linux Viewer: 1.23.5 (136262)
Linux: Debian "Lenny" 5.0.1 32 Bit

The viewer works so far, all the graphics stuff is ok, I can hear ambient and UI sounds and voice chat works in both ways (listen & talk). My system is setup with ALSA and compatibility modules for apps requiring OSS or Esound.

I have problems with listening to streaming music. The debug console shows "starting" and "playing" messages, no error message, but no sound. The "play" button changes to a "pause" button though.

With streaming video it is worse. Trying to start a video by clicking the "play" button for video, but the "play" button does not even change to "pause" or something like that. No messages on the debug console.

So can anybody help me with that? Please don't ask questions like "is your media url ok?" I own land in SL and I know how to do things there. And I can verify that it's working using the Windows client.

Thank you in advance for suggestions.

Let me ask another question, then. What happens when you start a terminal and run gst-launch-0.10 playbin uri=http://your.media.url/ (replacing the last part with the URL in question)?

For explanation, on Linux, SL uses GStreamer to playback audio and video streams. It needs the 0.10 version. GStreamer doesn't bring any codecs with it by itself, those have to be provided by plugin packages. The above command will try to playback the stream with GStreamer 0.10, so you'll see whether you have the required version and plugins installed. (Note that for other stream formats you might need yet other plugins.) If the playback fails, you'll probably see some useful error messages on the terminal output. If the playback works fine from the terminal, but not from SL, the issue is with SL.

Thanks for the tip! I tried it out with a music url and I found out that the gstreamer mp3 plugin was missing. After installing the fluendo mp3 decoder plugin - music streams now work both in SL and using a term!

So there's one problem left - video streams. Using gst-launch to play a video url results in

Setting pipeline to PAUSED ...
Pipeline is PREROLLING ...

and that's it. gst-launch is sitting there forever until I stop it using ctrl-c. No other error messages. Any idea where to look for helpful messages?

Thanks again,
Wolfe

And thanks from me too, Boroondas - that's fixed my problem as well.

- Ford.

I'm still having issues with my Ubuntu 9.04.

I installed the missing plugin: fluendo mp3 decoder. Ran the code listed in the above post and got this:

From command line I get:
nikon@mee-kan:~/Downloads/SecondLife-i686-1.23.5.136262$ gst-launch-0.10 playbin uri=http://ns57.ovh.net:80/
Setting pipeline to PAUSED ...
Pipeline is PREROLLING ...
Pipeline is PREROLLED ...
Setting pipeline to PLAYING ...
New clock: GstPulseSinkClock

And the music starts playing

When I launch SL from command line, I see:
2009-12-13T01:03:22Z INFO: startInternetStream: entered startInternetStream()
2009-12-13T01:03:22Z INFO: startInternetStream: mInternetStreamMedia is now 0xa624aba8
2009-12-13T01:03:22Z INFO: startInternetStream: Starting internet stream: http://ns57.ovh.net:80/
2009-12-13T01:03:22Z INFO: startInternetStream: Playing.....

And I get nothing

No clue what to do next.

------

econd Life 1.23.5 (136262) Oct 14 2009 11:42:39 (Second Life Release)
Release Notes

Built with GCC version 40102

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
Memory: 3895 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.28-17-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 1 21:27:25 UTC 2009 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 9600 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 3.0.0 NVIDIA 180.44

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7c zlib/1.2.3.3 c-ares/1.4.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU
Audio Driver Version: OpenAL, version 1.1 / OpenAL Community / OpenAL Soft: ALSA Software on default
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.28994 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.18_0000000000)

I was just reading the Snowflake Readme, and found that SL uses the 32bit gstreamer. Now I'm trying to figure out how to install that. Didn't even thing of the 32/64bit issue.

Installing a 32bit GStreamer on 64bit Ubuntu might not be trivial (I never tried).

The alternatives are to either install a 32bit Ubuntu on a free partition and use that for SL (dual boot) or to use a 64bit viewer, which should be able to talk to 64bit GStreamer. (Try http://omvviewer.byteme.org.uk/. See installation instructions for Ubuntu at http://omvviewer.byteme.org.uk/ubuntu_binary.shtml)

OMV has some issues. First being the picking of a font at random for everything, and it also has issues with clothing and some prims. Frankly, I can deal with the lack of streaming music, if everything else looks ok.

What we need is an official 64bit client.

Agreed.

You might want to vote for
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7716 ("Please create a 64-bit viewer."
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-13793 ("Full support for Linux 64-bit"

See also the other issues linked at the meta issue https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2788

You will need to install the gstreamer-ffmpeg package. That's what I had to do to get streaming video working in Ubuntu 9.04, not sure about Karmic Koala though. I think gstreamer-ffmpeg is available from Add/Remove Apps menu. If not, just install from Synaptic Manager via Admin menu.

Hope this helps...Cheers!
~~Fish~~