Music and Audio became worse

Moin,

we all had been forced to update to the adult viewer

But it looks as if the viewer changed how it handled music and audio:

1: It looks as if the LL_BAD_ESD, LL_BAD_OSS, LL_BAD_ALSA environment variables are ignored. Its not possible to force ESD or OSS as it had been with the old viewer. I fear, SL does no longer support ESD anymore. SL/Voice stopped supporting ESD since 1.19, forcing me to buy an USB headset, that is dedicated to voice.

2. Music streams are now handled in a different way. On the good side: ogg streams no longer crash SL client, but I can still not hear them. On the ugly side: A shoutcast server, where the routing is down will freeze the viewer for an infinite time. A shoutcast server that goes down because of stream switch will freeze the viewer for 2-5 seconds. So the only thing I could do is kill -9, if a shoutcast server that is on parcel does not answer anymore.

Does SL now require/use gstreamer for music streams also? Because the freeze was only known with broken video streams before.

Please fix this - SL had been much better with 1.18 client !

ciao,Kephra

You can use LL_BAD_OPENAL_DRIVER to use the 'old' sound driver, which lets you directly use ESD etc.

Moin Tofu,



I have not tested, if its possible to use a headset without own USB audio again for voice. ESD was necessary for old (2006/2007) Secondlife clients to mix both gstreamer video and sl mp3 on one soundcard. It later allowed to mix voice to same soundcard. With SL 1.19 the voice client changed to use AL Soft, instead of old lib OpenAL, and AL Soft did not support ESD. So SL Voice stopped working for me with SL 1.19, and its working again since I have a new Logitech USB headset.

Well: Support of ESD/Pulse, or even better Jack would be a nice to have on the wishlist for 2010, but its not priority.

The pressing matter is, that SL hangs, if an mp3 music stream has routing problems. This makes walking/flying/sailing in SL with music turned on similar to a russian roulette. I have to kill -9 my client regulary, because I forgot to turn of music.

Now routing problems are hard to reproduce/debug. So I played around with iptables to recreate the problem. Lets say my routing goes over eth2. The following line (on the SL system as root) will cause SL to hang, if the land has a shoutcast server at port 8012.

iptables -A OUTPUT -o eth2 -p tcp --dport 8012 -j DROP

The only thing I can do is: kill -9

I dont know what client version was able to play music without gstreamer. An `export GST_DEBUG="*:2"` (or GST_DEBUG="GST_URI:5" tells me, that actual SL client is using gstreamer to play not only video but also music. So I fear the problem is within the GST lib, as those SL client hangs did not happen with older SL clients (that we can no longer use, because of the adult changes).

Is there a JIRA to describe this problem already ?

ciao,Kraehe

PS: Clean the firewall with `iptables -F OUTPUT` or restart your default firewall, after testing this iptables line.