Plasma recognizes headphones port but sound doesn't play

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

While setting up a new installation of endeavouros, I have finally succeeded, with support from the forum, in getting Plasma to recognize the audio port of my Raspberry Pi 4B, but playing audio files does not produce any sound in the speakers. The installation is intended to replace the previous Manjaro OS, in which there was no problem with sound or video. (In the endeavouros system video doesn’t play either in Firefox). As I’ve said elsewhere in this forum, I’m not a systems person, but in the hope that the forum may be able to help me, I set out below a comparative listing of the software on the two systems found by searching under ‘audio’ and ‘sound’ in the 'Add/Remove Software package. Some of the items in the ENDEAVOUROS column may be redundant, having been installed during my attempts to get the sound port recognized. There are clearly several differences between the two columns, and if these give a clue to those more expert than myself, I’d be very glad for any advice arising.

ENDEAVOUROS	                      MANJARO
a52dec	                          a52dec
alsa-card-profiles	              alsa-card-profiles
alsa-lib	                      alsa-lib
chromaprint	
	                              alsa-utils
	                              alsa_ucm-conf
	                              cdrdao
ffmpeg	                          ffmpeg
	                              ffmpeg4.4
fluidsynth	                      fluidsynth
lib-firmware-cirrus	
	                              jack2
	                              libao
libiec1883	                      libiec61833
	                              libmad
libopenmpt	                      libopenmpt
libpipewire	                      libpipewire
libpulse	                      libpulse
libsamplerate	                  libsamplerate
libsndfile	                      libsndfile
libvorbis	                      libvorbis
lv2	
	                              linux-firmware-cirrus
ocean-sound-theme	              ocean-sound-theme
openal	                          openal
opus	                          opus
oxygen-sounds	                  oxygen-sounds
pipewire	                      pipewire
pipewire-alsa	                  pipewire-alsa
Pipewire-audio	                  pipewire-audio
pipewire-jack	
	                              pipewire-pulse
	                              pipewire-zeroconf
plasma-pa	                      plasma-pa
portaudio	                      portaudio
pulsaudio-alsa	
pulseaudio	
pulseaudio-qt	                  pulseaudio-qt 
pulseaudio-equalizer	
	                              qt5-multimedia
qt6-multimedia	                  qt6-multimedia
rubberband	                      rubberband
	                              sdl_sound
sdl3	                          sdl3
sndio	
sound-theme-freedesktop	          sound-theme_freedesktop
soundtouch	                      soundtouch
taglib	                          taglib
	                              vamp-plugin-sdk
	                              vlc-plugin-alsa
	                              webrtc-audio-processing-0.3
webrtc-audio-processing-1	      webrtc-audio-processing-1
2

One thing I am missing is pipewire-pulse. But you have to know, it will remove pulseaudio.

3

Thanks for your reply, marteng69. Since reading it I’ve done a bit of on-line searching, and get the impression that if pipewire is installed, I probably don’t need pulseaudio anyway. I therefore assume that installing pipewire-pulse is the logical thing to do, and won’ t mess things up, but I’d appreciate your confirmation.

4

To confirm, this will be fine. Installing pipewire-pulse will remove pulseaudio (Source) for you and the default config should be fine. As far as I can see, after a reboot this will hopefully sort your problem.

EDIT - Good luck :slight_smile:. Oh, and to be clear, if using pipewire, which is now default and I’d certainly recommend, you should only have pipewire-pulse, not the pulseaudio packages installed, as you thought. I think having packages for bits of both systems installed (rather than letting pipewire handle it entirely, including managing its own little pulseaudio server - which is how I understand the pipewire-pulse package) will create conflicts and issues.

5

Thanks for that reply, and my apologies for late response caused by my fibre broadband connection having gone down on Wednesday and only just been reinstated. I’ll instal pipewire-pulse asap.

6

I have now installed pipewire-pulse, and confirmed that sound is working in Firefox. However, videos don’t play in Firefox, although they do in Chromium. In view of your comment, I uninstalled pulseaudio-also and tried to uninstall pulseaudio-qt, in case they were interfering with the video aspect. The error message from the attempt to uninstall pulseaudio-qt was:

could not satisfy dependencies:

  • removing pulseaudio-qt breaks dependency ‘pulseaudio-qt’ required by kdeconnect

The only other item installed which may be pulseaudio-related is pavucontrol, but as that is the only installable volume control device I can find on the system with a simple search in Add/Remove Software, I assume I should not remove it.

I invite your comments.

7

Hmm, interesting, and I confess from this point on, I’m not sure. If it’s hardware specific, I don’t have a raspberry pi unfortunately. Some speculations below just in case they help you:

It’s interesting to me that chromium works and firefox doesn’t. Do you have any media players installed and do they work? Related to using pavucontrol, I did find this old BBS thread where someone was setting up pipewire and Firefox. In this instance, when pipewire was installed it shoved Firefox onto a random nonexistent audio device (i.e. it told Firefox to play audio through speakers that didn’t exist). They were able to find and fix this through pavucontrol; have you had a rummage around in pavucontrol to see which device Firefox is trying to play audio through, as compared with chromium?

BTW - Using pavucontrol is completely fine - it can talk to the pulseaudio server pipewire runs inside itself, and so control the audio, thanks to the pipewire-pulse package. Same is true for the KDE connect dependency you mention, or any application expecting to talk to a pulseaudio server; they’re fine because pipewire can handle it with pipewire-pulse. What you needed to avoid, and did so with changes you made, was trying to run two audio servers - a freestanding pulseaudio one alongside a pipewire based one (which can include its nested pulseaudio).

8

Thanks for your detailed attention to this thread linuxtom. I’ve now found the solution to the non-loading of videos, thanks to the following URL:

which finally showed me the route to the part of Firefox’s Settings facility dealing with hardware acceleration, a term which cannot be found by using the top-level search facility in Settings. Having turned off hardware acceleration, Firefox now plays videos perfectly normally, with full sound.

Thanks also to all who have provided advice in this thread.