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Saturday 4 July 2009

Fast playback in Kino on a Pulseaudio system

I have only just found out that the default Fedora 11 install of Kino (when I say "default", it comes from the RPM Fusion repo) has a big problem with audo and hence the playback speed of DV files.

Everything is fine until you hit the platy button. There is no sound and the video plays back at around 10x. I found that the problem is, if Kino has an issue with the audio output device and cannot connect properly then it will try and auto determine the audio sample rate and up the speed of playback to match.

The solution is simple (although not obvious until you find it), you just run Kino through the "padsp" command. This emulates the old /dev/dsp sound device used in ALSA sound systems for the application which it invokes. So running Kino from the command line like this:

padsp kino &

works a treat. Under preferences you can leave the audio device enabled and listed as /dev/dsp and the problem is solved.

As usual with Linux there are a miriade of ways to automated this for launching in the future. You could add this as an alias to your ~/.bashrc file or create a script which launches the command and place it in your ~/bin/ directory. You can come up with your own ways, but I thought the simple way was to just add an alias to my ~/.bashrc file.

alias kino=`padsp kino`

You will have to log out and back in again for this to take effect before you run it.

I hope this helps anyone else out there who is banging their head trying to solve this problem.

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