OpenSUSE sound problem (was: Compatibility)

[willem1940NLD]

I got VLC player working fine now on SUSE 11.2, rather old computer 1GHz, 780MB RAM, 2HD 80GB each with swap partitions 2.3GB each.

For the purpose, however, I had to kill quite some other software (and believe me I have been busy trying to keep all of them):

- Removed ALL other "players" (except "Flash" and "Moonlight")
- Removed OpenOfficeOrg
- Removed aMSN Messenger

- Antique KOffice causes no harm
- Antique Kopete Messenger causes no harm (tried some others as well, but in vain).

Cannot explain this outcome, I am not a technician .... but I got what I needed.

[willem1940NLD]

Additional info: extra KOffice parts,
- KOffice docs
- KOffice plato
made "old" problems reappear.

I do not know the use of these 2 but had installed them for curiosity. Now deleted of course.

[willem1940NLD]

Sorry, I have to correct myself: all the things I did, seem to only defer the failure.

After looking 10 or more videos on web, old error reappears.

Message from VLCplayer:

Potential ALSA version problem:
VLC failed to initialize your sound output device (if any).
Please update alsa-lib to version 1.0.24 or higher to try to fix this issue.

Then I reinstall/refresh VLC-player using one-click-install vlc.ymp, restart the computer and can watch some 10 more web videos .... vicious circle.

Present ALSA in SUSE 11.2 is version 1.0.21 with 1.0.17 "wrapper".

Found and tried 1.0.23 as highest version (SUSE Factory) but no improvement so, back to old 1.0.21

"Wrapper": no higher version found.

Guess I have to wait for better times.

[willem1940NLD]

Sad; found no newer remedy. VLC uninstalled and SUSE 11.2 degraded by means of upgrade install .... all standard programs back and for the time being I will not try anything more with VLC.

Really a pity, I found this the best of all players during the moments it functioned.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

You should probably be using PulseAudio instead of ALSA. Then it would not be a problem.

Alternatively, use a better distribution.
I already warned the OpenSUSE VLC maintainer that he needs to update ALSA, but he refused to do so: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.v ... evel/73077

[willem1940NLD]

Thanks a lot, Rémi; matching info reached me today on Nedlinux forum. I had a many different distros on board the last few years and finally prefer to keep SUSE .... so will have to wait for probably a year or so to make proper use of VLC which I so desire, instead of the usual handful of traditional Linux media players.

[willem1940NLD]

Second thoughts ....; friends on Nedlinux Forum convinced me to try again. I installed VLC using the vlc.ymp one-click installer; did not see "impulse" in VLC options so installed impulse-audio through Yast, then looked again, found and selected impulse.

Looked some 30-40 clips on Web. Mpg and wmv went fine so far, avi kind of problematic, often blurry screen and sometimes at missing or losing the sound, needing restart of the webpage.

At least this seems an important improvement, will keep experimenting for another couple of days.

[willem1940NLD]

Meantime I abandoned SUSE ..... and took Puppy Lupu 501 instead. No luck yet with VLC in Firefox, although mediapayer connectivity addon duly installed.

With SUSE already, got reported at download of Pulseaudio: "basic files libiconv perlapi-5.10.0 missing" ..... and same now with Puppy.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=31890

[willem1940NLD]

Meantime using puppy 510 and VLC; Puppyans showed me a way to make Firefox use it. Most files/streams now working fairly well, but still sometimes blurring video screen and/or losing sound, plus (rare) freezes on seemingly ordinary *.wmv and *.avi.