Test viewer: bleeding-edge audio+voice rewrite

still cant get streaming audio anymore with 1.21.6,, what changed from 1.21.5? streaming video works at a super slow frame rate with no sound...

itll say its starting the stream, then say its playing.. no error messages... but i hear nothing....

What sound system are you using (ALSA, Pulseaudio)? Are you getting other in-game sounds?

One more thing: If you can, try copying the URL for the stream you are trying to play, paste it into MPlayer, and see if it plays there. If not, then it's either a dead stream, or you're missing the codecs to play it.

most places I go I just use view admin options, see the lands stream, the copy and paste it into mplayer and listen to it, works fine outside of SL. I've switch my setting for alsa, OSS, pulse, and ESD... It doesn't care. About 10% of the time now it will play, just randomly with no changes. I'm not going to worry about it, I can just listen to it outside of SL the few times I want to. I'm just glad sound and voice are working.

I've been trying this viewer for the past few days. I get both audio and voice at the same time (which is really nice!), but still no music or video feeds. I can plug the URL's for those into VLC and get the feeds, but they don't work through sl. I've even tried removing libstdc++.so.6 with no effect. Also, it doesn't seem to make any difference whether or not I use esd and/or pa, the result is the same.

About the only other thing is that prims, textures and scripted sounds seem to rez in more slowly than before. Aside from that, it works pretty much the same.

Can I haz signature?

Okay, I think I have figured out the Pulseaudio crashing problem...

I have not been using this new viewer version because of the nasty hang I get when trying to close it; however, I have been using the Vivox binary and libraries with the v1.21.6.99587 release, and it has been working well, except it would occasionally crash Pulseaudio.

What I did to fix that problem is to change Pulseaudio's nice setting from its default of -11 to -15. No more crashes, and no noticeable performance hit from changing the setting. I need to figure out how to change it permanently so that I don't have to change it each time I restart my computer, but at least we're getting somewhere.

Posting to follow up...

I spoke too soon about how re-nicing Pulseaudio cured the problem. It didn't. It made it happen less frequently, but it still happened far too often to be simply an annoyance, so I tried a few other things.

Going in and editing the secondlife startup script and uncommenting two of the first three lines, forcing the viewer to use ALSA (uncomment the lines about avoiding OSS and ESD) significantly reduced the incidences of Pulseaudio hanging, but still didn't get rid of it entirely. But now it's at least somewhat bearable.

Today, however, I caught SLVoice in the act of strangling Pulseaudio to death. I happened to have the Pulseaudio Manager window open and visible while I was in the game. I noticed that occasionally when I crossed region lines, SLVoice would disconnect and reconnect (the same thing that happens immediately following a teleport). Normal behavior, I'm pretty sure. But what I did notice that was out of the ordinary is that SLVoice would sometimes rapidly disconnect and reconnect several times in a fraction of a second before settling down. Occasionally, however, it would not settle down. Instead - when I caught it abusing Pulseaudio - it would disconnect and reconnect more than a thousand times in the space of a few seconds - at which time it overflowed Pulseaudio's memory pool, causing Pulseaudio to basically roll over and die.

When PA dies in this manner, it shows up in the System Monitor as waiting on futex_wait. It requires me to either kill it within System Monitor or via killall -9 pulseaudio. Pulseaudio can then be restarted, but fmod does not reconnect, requiring restarting the SL viewer to restore audio.

I do not believe the SLVoice binary is to blame, however. I had been using the SLVoice binary (together with libalut, libopenal, libortp, and libvivoxsdk) from this test viewer in my release version install to make voice work. However, I just tried restoring the original SLVoice binary that came with the release version, and it did not solve the lockup problem. So my feeling is that the new libopenal is causing the problem. However, running the game with voice disabled completely eliminates the lockup problem.

Edited to add: It would be helpful to know exactly which files are different between this test version and the latest official version, so I know what to chase. In particular, between the SLVoice binary and its dependencies, which files are different between the two versions?

I have also been experimenting in the hope of finding a workaround for all this. I have also tried your suggestions Katheryne, and have experienced pretty much identical problems, it seems SLVoice just don't want to go along with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, and it's pulseaudio setup. SLVoice just seems to kill my pulseaudio most times, and I am left with a sound repeating from my speakers almost like a speeded up broken record, at other times pulseaudio just freezes...locking all system sound until I kill pulseaudio manually, this stage as you have commented above is stuck at a 'futex_wait'.

I also uncommented those lines a while back and they seemed to make things run slightly better, aside from the constant disconnects I still experience, each reconnection seemed to connect back to the correct voice channel.

Hi Team

Sad to report still no voice here, sound is working fine under Pulse - just no voice

Let me know if u need any further info.

Keep up the good work


Cheers

Voice (and sometimes sound) has been broken for me since 1.21, at least. I tried the Tofu release and ONE combo of systems and OS worked (see below).


Desktop System
Sabayon 3.2 Beta 2 (Kernel 2.6.24) SBLIVE, using ALSA

1.21(any) 1.21.6.100000, 1.22(any) Voice works for 1:30sec, drops and reconnects, no voice on subsequent connects. Unchecking and rechecking voice without logging will start the cycle again.

Using Sabayon 3.5 (2.6.25) No voice, no sound.

---------

Laptop System
Sabayon 3.5 (Kernel 2.6.25) HDA Intel, using ALSA

1.22(all) No voice, no sound.
<<<< 1.21.6.100000 HOORAY! Voice AND sound work! ^_^ >>>>
1.21(the rest) No voice, no sound.

I use fdupes (see http://netdial.caribe.net/~adrian2/fdupes.html ) to find out about such things.

Ok for streaming but voice doesn't work.

...from another tred


How to know if Sls lib folder is in my path? And if not, how to copy all its libs into my system lib folder? I extracted OpenAL in my home as a subfolder in my kubuntu 8.10.

...from another tred


How to set Alsa as daemon and route it on my kubuntu 8.10?

It's the opposite for me. I get voice and in-world sounds, but no streaming. I use vlc to stream audio (haven't tried video).

Since 1.21.* Voice cannot work because of a faulty libvivoxsdk.so, as in jira is said, following can be done to patch it:
1. cat /proc/cpuinfo > cpuinfo
2. echo 'power management:' >> cpuinfo
3. cp libvivoxsdk.so libvivoxsdk.so.bak
4. sed -i 's/\/proc\/cpuinfo/lib\/cpuinfo\c@\c@/g' libvivoxsdk.so
This fixes one part of the problem, second install openal-soft en copy this one over the one found in lib (from: http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html)
The last part, install freealut en copy the installed file from (probably /usr/lib) to the lib folder of secondlife.
After this is done and checked that the microphone and speakers are working normally under linux.
Now you should have voice.
Tested it yesterday and more than 4 hours of voice (with an interval without logging out).

So what is done:
1) patched libvivoxsdk.so
2) replaced libopenal.so
3) replaced libalut.so

Working on a Fedora Core 10 32 bit machine with a core 2 duo and an Nvidia 9600GT card, with pulse audio

Added (not in other post):
Sometimes voice doesn't start, but TP from to an other sim and back somehow makes is work.

I hope people can confirm this "workaround"

Its great to not crash when attempting to play my OGG Stream Anime Radio now. Even Lets me play my aacPlus Stream. Which would be a plus to have also playable of aacPlus on the windows viewer. Save me allot bandwidth. lol

And i can finally use voice now in Linux. At first i was mad getting left out of voice chats but didn't want to reboot into vista. I find SL runs more smoothly when I use it on Linux.

There one thing i don't care for is ability of it to stay connected to Either aacPlus or OGG streams. When it cuts out it doesn't seem to rebuff (at lest quick enough). Other software plays them great and if do cut out rebuff right away in a snap. Which don't seem to be the case here. so its sorta upsetting. My radio on my home server which is connected to my ISP which isn't allot bandwidth. Maybe once more testing and changes are done it maybe better I dun know. Coding Programs isn't one of my strong points. but right now at both my Stream Type setting there not really a reason for it to be cuting out when it don't on other Media Player programs. If the Auto Re buffer works better in case a stream cuts out is done better. I bee a Happy Camper. lol

If you like my Terminal Log and system info, Its all Here
http://foxzone.ath.cx/troy/page.php?10

__________________
Troy Childs
Http://FoxZone.Ath.Cx

Tried that on my Mandriva 2009 edition, these tips have enabled me to listen to a private voice chat, not in open chat however and my mic output doesnt work (Does in linux - just not sl)..... so closer but still no cigar

Oops. Funny. I never notice sticky threads anymore. Read through them once and then for some reason automatically assume they never change. LOL.

Anyway, I'm going to try this out in the next couple days. Hope it is still valid. FYI sound (including sound streams) have worked well for a very, very long time on my system running 64-bit Fedora Core (7 and then 9). I do have a ton of 32-bit libraries installed. OCCASIONALLY it locks up the sound daemon(s) so I have to restart X (not my whole machine or I'd be screaming).

I don't know if this is going to help anything Tofu, but I actually had Voice working in the client right out of the box for a very short period back in March of 2008. I'm not sure if I was using the released version or the release candidate. My system info has probably changed since then though (at least the software portion; my hardware is exactly the same). I think I was running FC7. Maybe I'll look for old posts where I put my specs in from then. Heh.

--------

Second Life 1.22.7 (108773) Jan 23 2009 19:49:13 (Second Life Release Candidate)
Release Notes

You are at 252001.5, 271056.3, 25.2 in Explorers Rangeland located at sim2071.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.16.76:13002)
Second Life Server 1.25.4.108489
Release Notes

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+
Memory: 2012 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.27.9-73.fc9.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Dec 16 14:54:03 EST 2008 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 7600 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 177.82

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7c zlib/1.2.3 c-ares/1.4.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.21406 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 340/8339 (4.1%)

im running the release version with kath's hacks followed to a t, one time i started sl, killed pulseaudio then enabled voice chat and it all came together, though ive tried to recreate this many times now i've had no luck

i run ubuntu 8.10 with the most recent alsa drivers (1.19) on a amd athlon 64x2 with intel integrated soundcard, alc888.

The suggested workarounds in this thread, do work, but I, about 85% of the time experience pulseaudio freezing and locking out all sound from my entire system.

If I kill pulseaudio and run the 'untouched' bleeding edge viewer voice works well (then it will disconnect and reconnect every few minutes, connecting mostly to a void channel), so it works, well apart from all streaming media on my system. More importantly though this viewer succeeds in using ALSA to connect to the voice service.

Back to the subject of a working voice function, that's useful to us. I have tried various workarounds, replacing files and choosing 'OSS', but all of these tricks (although get voice working...sometimes lol), result in about 85% of voice connects, pulseaudio freezing and locking system sounds out.

The only reliable method of getting voice to work for me has been to run the windows voice application within WINE, and create a 'dummy' SLVoice file in the main directory 'bin' folder replacing the voice file already there.

This thread explains all,

/263/88/301312/1.html

Tofu Said: The so-called 'bleeding-edge' viewer in the sticky thread above may help you with this. There are quite a lot of Linux audio changes coming in viewer 1.23.

Hi Tofu

Running Mandriva 2009 Linux with PULSE audio, ALSA and ESD Exxtensions.

Have never quite gotten voice to work, closes was in V 1.19 (Under Mandriva 200, or now with a hacked 1.21 that allows me to only hear another ava in a private voice conference with them. (Mic dont work for me in SL under this condition - does however work with linux)

Im happy to be a test Guinea pig for the ALPHA 1.23 release, even in current state. Ive just been diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel syndrome on my left wrist and would love to run voice under linux, failing that its loading sl under WINE ..... dont want to go there lol

So let me know where to download the code from and I can give u some feedback

Cheers

Photon

Hi Photon, the URL is in the first post in this thread. That's worth trying, but - 1.22RC8 should be released within a day or two which includes all of these improvements and more, so that'd be even better to try.
Thanks!

I have to wonder what the motivation was in going with libvivox given it's draconian licensing and apparent unwillingness to work with the SL community on making it work. We're not well served (or served at all) by the existing VOIP provider; why can't we use something that's standard and is known to work?

Hi Tofu

Yep tried that when it fist hit with no improvement, Since then have been working my way up the 1.22 Test series in the hope that one of them will be the one to crack my sound problems..... so I eagerly look forward the 1.22RC8. Keep up the great work you and the team are doing

Cheers

Photon