Kaffeine no sound
Ok – so now post upgrade to Mandriva 2006 I sit down to try something out. Put a dvd in the drive and see what happens. I rarely sit and watch dvd’s on the desktop, but it’s always been a possibility… So, when I pop the disc in, kaffeine pops up with it’s “install” sequence – checks to see what’s on the system and what’s not what version of kde, libdvdcss, dvd, dvb hardware, etc….
So, the disc pops up and no sound…. hmm. maybe it’s just kaffeine…
Ok, launch mplayer, same thing, no sound. We’ll maybe we’ve got a loose cable. I hadn’t actually wired the audio out on this drive to the sound card. Ok – mplayer now has sound for the dvd. Back to kaffeine. Still no sound… hmmm In fact, no sound with ANYTHING in kaffeine. I start browsing around and notice that kaffeine can use other “engines” for the multimedia – kaboodle is the “embedded media player”, an embedded mplayer is a possibility as well. (Which I apparently didn’t have setup.) The embedded media player though didn’t support dvd’s (although sound did work).
Then, I notice in the Settings menu, “xine Engine parameters” – aha – it’s not a native kde engine (you know what that means arts…) So, under xine engine parameters, I clicked on audio and then instead of “auto”, I selected arts. (Since arts is the default audio framework I’m using under kde.) From then on sound has worked. with no problems.
So, after playing a dvd with kaffeine for a bit (with the xine backend..) it seems to be pretty good. It supports dvd menus, subtitles, different audio tracks, etc. It looks like there are some plugins for video/audio processing as well. Last time I saw kaffeine it was not nearly so robust as it appears now.