Sound works fine, but not with videos

[Potiphar Breen]

Sorry if this issue has been dealt with here a million times, but this is my first day of seriously trying to work with Linux and I'm not even competent enough to recognize useful messages among the 67 pages of them that come up when I search "video sound."

Problem: No sound with videos, whether streaming or local. Videos play fine, just silently.

The "test" button plays music through my Logitech USB headset in system settings > multimedia > sound and video configuration > video (and all the other options: music, games, etc.) Music plays fine through Amarok, if a little short of volume, even at 100%. When I test PulseAudio, an error message comes up saying that it doesn't work. Testing any of the HDA ATI SB options produces only silence. Beyond that, I'm every bit as clueless as I must seem.

Any suggestions much appreciated!

Thanks.

PBreen

[Midnighter]

What soundcard/etc/ do you have? What version of Mint are you running? No videos play any sound, at all?

[Potiphar Breen]

I can't swear that no videos at all produce sound, but I haven't found one yet that does.

The machine is built on a GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard. (Time to upgrade again!) Sound is just the onboard Realtek ALC889A audio. I don't think it's a hardware problem, as things work fine under that other operating system. Software is mplayer or VLC. Doesn't matter which I use.

Other details: Athlon 64 X2 7750 Kuma processor, 4GB ram, onboard Radeon video replaced by a PNY GTS 250 card.

Thanks for any help.

PBreen

[Potiphar Breen]

Knew I'd forgotten something. It's version 8 of Linux Mint.

[vincent]

Have you tried configuring alsamixer and turning everything up? i.e. just open up a terminal and type:

Code: Select all

alsamixer

If that doesn't work, we'll need more information about your machine; please provide the output of the following terminal command:

Code: Select all

inxi -F

[Potiphar Breen]

That's interesting. alsamixer shows the headphon set to 00 volume, but it does not respond to the up and down arrows or the +/- keys. The other bars ("master" and so on) respond as expected. The headphones are plugged in, BTW. In any case, I haven't found anything where the sound doesn't work other than videos. Don't have any games on here, though.

inixi -F produces the following:

System: Host Owens-desktop ;Kernel 2.6.31-16-generic i686 (32 bit) Distro Linux Mint 8 Helena KDE Community Edition

CPU: Dual core AMD Athlon 7750 (SMP) cache 1024 KB flags (sse4a nx lm svm) bmips 10823.4

Clock Speeds: (1) 1350.00 MHz (2) 2700.00 MHz

Graphics: Card nVidia G92 (GeForce GTS 250) X.rg 1.6.4 Res: 1920x1080@60.0hz

GLX Renderer Software Rasterizer GLX Version 2.1 Mesa 7.6 Direct Rendering Yes

Audio: Card-1 ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) driver HDA Intel
Card-2 Logitech Inc. driver snd-usb-audio
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Version 1.0.20

Network: Card /reaktej /rtl8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller driver r8169 v: 2.3LK-NAPI at port de00

Disks: HDD Total Size: 1800.4GB (0.2% used) 1: /dev/sda WDC WD1600AAJS-1 160.0GB
2: /dev/sdb WDC WD6401AALS-0 640.1GB
3: /dev/sdb WDC WD10EADS-00L 1000.2GB

Partition: ID:/ size: 141G used: 4.1G (4%) fs: ext4 ID:swap-1 size: 6.54GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap

Info: Processes 143 Uptime 2 days Memory 332.2/3275.0MB Client Shell inxi 1.2.6

No doubt more than you ever wanted to know! Thanks for taking a look at this.

PBreen

[Potiphar Breen]

Now the music isn't working. No idea what I did.

PBreen

[Midnighter]

Looks like you have 2x sound cards. I assume one is the onboard stuff. If so, disable it in the BIOS, and try again.

[Potiphar Breen]

Card 2 is just the driver for the Logitech USB headphones. No idea why it's showing up as a separate card. In any case, I assembled the machine myself and never installed a sound card.

Thanks for the suggestion.

PBreen