Bug 364911

Summary: Distortion and volume issues when using phonon-vlc backend
Product: [Frameworks and Libraries] Phonon Reporter: Dave Flogeras <dflogeras2>
Component: generalAssignee: Harald Sitter <sitter>
Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM    
Severity: normal CC: myriam, romain.perier, stupor_scurvy343
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: 4.9.0   
Target Milestone: 4.8   
Platform: Compiled Sources   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Dave Flogeras 2016-06-29 22:54:56 UTC 
Gentoo user, I am using kde-frameworks-5.23.0, plasma-5.6.5, phonon-4.9.0 and phonon-vlc-0.9.0.

On a quite default setup, if I do something like "unlock widgets" which will cause a pop up and a notification sound to occur the following happens:

1. sometimes the volume is noticeably louder than when I click the play button in the kcm notifications dialog.  This also causes clipping/distortion
2. sometimes the sound is a very garbled loud noise, which doesn't resemble the original sound (in this case Oxygen-Sys-Special.ogg) at all
3. If I click around in the kcm notifications dialog, most sounds seem to have an audible pop at their beginning.


if I switch to phonon-gstreamer-4.9.0 backend, the issue seems to go away.

Reproducible: Always
Comment 1 Harald Sitter 2016-06-30 07:43:48 UTC 
the volume difference comes from the sounds not actually being sounds as per stream-category remark in https://community.kde.org/Phonon/Releases/VLC/0.9.0
which is fixed for vlc3 https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=phonon-vlc.git&a=commit&h=001c117c2aa543015140f83184d6fb06728a385f

the overall sounds quality issues you'll want to report against vlc directly.