The VideoLAN Forums

Hi,

I am running the latest VLC (I built from source just git and did a 'git pull --rebase') on Ubuntu 10.10.
When I first play a video file (a mkv file), I have audio. But as soon as I seek to a position of the file (click on the progress bar some where), the audio is gone (goes silence). I have the audio back on when i switch the audio device from 'stereo' to 'mono' and back to 'stereo' again.

Does anyone know how to resolve this?

Thank you.

I think I have had this and a similar problem, and I think I have solved it (you never know - it might come back!).

I now have U11.04+VLC1.1.9 and not only did I sometimes experience your problem, but also audio failure after some minutes eg 10-15. As with you, the work around was to alter the audio settings to something silly, then back. I simply disabled and then selected Track 1 again. This worked for both file and DVD playing, but was very tedious.

Finally: Tools/Preferences/Audio/Output Module
choosing
ALSA audio output
instead of
default

Wehey!

Regards

Oops! It did come back. But I think it was because the above was necessary but not sufficient. I was playing a recording last night, and it kept losing sound, which could be tediously fixed as described above. Today, I replayed the file without loss of sound by doing this as well:

NOT ONLY:
Tools/Preferences/Audio/Output Module
choosing
ALSA audio output
instead of
default

BUT ALSO (at the same place in preferences)

Device:
As appropriate instead of Default
In my case the analog output instead of the digital or HDMI available on my motherboard

THEN the file played perfectly. I vaguely recall doing both the above when a DVD misplayed, and it then played from start to finish without troubles.

WHETHER the above two actions PERMANENTLY stops both the original problem (loss of sound after re-positioning using the progress bar) and loss of sound whilst playing normally remains to be seen. An issue with these problems is that you never know if the actions actually worked until there is another failure, in which case, they didn't work completely! If they make the issue go away for a long time, perhaps that's the best it gets!

I did, on the file mentioned, change the progress bar position both forwards and backwards more than a dozen times without loss of sound.

Please retry with VLC 1.2. PulseAudio output in VLC 1.1.x is broken beyond repair.

I have been experiencing this very same problem for a while with vlc1.2-git on Ubuntu10.04.

Whatever the file (.mp4, .mkv, ...) and the interface (qt4, skins2), the audio is lost when seeking with the position slider.
A workaround is to uncheck and check again the Audio/Device/"playback/recording through the PuseAudio sound Server" entry in the popupmenu. Audio is then back to normal.

On the same machine and config, vlc1.1.9 works very fine (no such problem)

If that can be of any help for maintainers,

Ubuntu10.04 runs a pulseAudio that vlc sees as too old as shown below :
It then defaults to Alsa, and overall Audio behaviour is quite erratic in this default config, as explained in the previous post. One tricky thing is that the PulseAudio Server is available in vlc popupmenus even though no pulseaudio plugin has been built.

In Ubuntu 11.04 I used ffmpeg-svn version. And with vlc 1.1.8 this problem didn't exist. But with vlc-1.2.0-git , I had the same problem. I had experienced lot many bugs in Ubuntu 11.04 so I wiped it off and installed Debian Squeeze. On this debian, vlc-1.2.0-git works perfectly fine with ffmpeg-git dated 16th May.

One thing to note is that I don't use pulseaudio. I use plain alsa.