Pulse Fiddling
All was good. Pulse was working fine. I added it to my /etc/rc.conf so it would start on boot with the rest of my daemons, so I turned my computer off happy in the knowledge that it would work fine when I turned it back on. I was wrong.
module-hal-detect
module-hal-detect is a module that, using HAL, detects your sound devices and configures them for you, so you don’t have to explicitely specify them in your /etc/pulse/default.pa file. It worked when I started Pulse manually, but not on boot and I’m still not certain why.
It took me a while to figure out that this module was causing the problem because, to be honest, the troubleshooting section on the Arch wiki entry for PulseAudio is a bit rubbish. I have since extended it with the solutions to the two problems here.
Once I had figured it out, I noticed that the Arch wiki mentioned that there were two ways of specifying the sound devices, one of which was module-hal-detect. On a whim, I decided to try the other. I hacked at my /etc/pulse/default.pa, the relavent section looks like this at the end:
### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
#.ifexists module-hal-detect.so
#load-module module-hal-detect
#.else
### Alternatively use the static hardware detection module (for systems that
### lack HAL support)
#load-module module-detect
#.endif
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0
load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0
I rebooted, since the problem only seemed to arise at boot - manually starting Pulse was fine somehow. It all worked! Pulse worked at boot, as it should!
VLC, DVD playback
I decided to celebrate by watching one of my favourite movies, Underworld, in VLC. I put the disc in, started VLC, clicked play, and was greeted with a horrible clicking/grinding noise. I tried another DVD, and a third, same problem. It worked fine with video files already on the computer, so I watched Underworld 2 instead.
I googled and googled, I found guides for Ubuntu relying on a plugin, but I could find neither an Arch port, nor the source. I did discover the VLC forums though, and a quick search revealed that the latest development version supported Pulse perfectly. Aha, I thought, a solution!
Elated by that knowledge, I dived into a terminal and searched for all VLC packages. I found vlc-nightly. I installed it, which took a while as it was from the AUR and so had to be compiled, and after changing the default audio device from ALSA to Pulse, it worked perfectly! On top of that, it has an amazing new interface and is a welcome change from the boring look of the old version. It now looks more like a media player than just a video player.
All in all…
All in all, PulseAudio is a very good sound system, well worth the few problems and difficulties you will have with it. I would recommend it to anyone who has fiddled with things before and isn’t afraid of stuff breaking - which is pretty much all users of Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, et al.
