[MPlayer-users] More on arts and kde3.1

[Michael Flohr]

Hi,

here I collect some further observations on the problem to
use "mplayer -ao arts" on kde 3.1 which some, but not all
useres with kde3.1 experience.

I use SuSE 7.3 with the kde 3.1 rpm packages provided by SuSE.
First of all: the arts output plugins of xine and xmms work both
without flaws. I cannot detect any other problems with artsd,
since all other applications run without problems.

Now, mplayer behaves very erratically. Sometimes, it works,
but most of the time it just kills the artsd daemon. This happens
independet of the files chosen to play with mplayer. The same file
sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't.
Of course, I use mplayer-0.90rc4 which I recompiled after
installing kde3.1.

First, I thought that mplayer simply links against a wrong library.
"ldd /usr/local/bin/mplayer" revealed that mplayer insisted to link
with /opt/kde2/lib/libartsc.so instead of /opt/kde3/lib/libartsc.so
(this is obviously due to SuSE setup of /etc/ld.so.conf since I kept my
old kde2 installation). After correcting this, I made sure that
"ldd /usr/local/bin/mplayer" showed that it now was compiled and linked
successfully against /opt/kde3/lib/libartsc.so.

Unfortunately, that didn't help much. The erratic behaviour remains.
SInce other arts-plugins for other apps don't show this problem,
I assume a small bug in mplayer's libao2/ao_arts.c but since mplayer
itself remains running and simply lets artsd crash, I don't get any
useful output from it. After crashing artsd, it simply stops playing,
since it cannot connect to the sound device anymore, of course.

In principle, the arts system didn't change much between kde2.x and
kde3.1. In both cases, the version is 0.95. However, some of the
libraries of the arts system changed from version .0 to version .1,
namely libsoundserver_idl.so.1, libkmedia2_idl.so.1, libartsflow.so.1 and
libartsflow_idl.so.1.

I hope these comments are of some help to pinpoint the problem,
Michael