Bug#1012186: dbus: does not recognize volume media keys as MPRIS events

[Claudio M]

Control: tags -1 - moreinfo

Thank you Simon,

turns out you hit the nail on the head: I had pulseaudio and pipewire, but
did not have pipewire-pulse installed.

Installed that, rebooted, and it's now working: volume up and down out of
the box, mute when I set the keybindings.

@gnome-shell team: considering I am on what is basically a fresh install,
should pipewire-pulse come preinstalled? My system, out of the box (from a
netinstall), comes with these packages (except pipewire-pulse, which I just
installed, and probably vlc-plugin-pipewire, which may have been installed
along with VLC)

$ dpkg -l | grep -E "pulseaudio|pipewire"
ii  gstreamer1.0-pipewire:amd64           0.3.51-1
  amd64        GStreamer 1.0 plugin for the PipeWire multimedia server
ii  gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio:amd64         1.20.2-1
  amd64        GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio (transitional package)
ii  libpipewire-0.3-0:amd64               0.3.51-1
  amd64        libraries for the PipeWire multimedia server
ii  libpipewire-0.3-common                0.3.51-1
  all          libraries for the PipeWire multimedia server - common files
ii  libpipewire-0.3-modules:amd64         0.3.51-1
  amd64        libraries for the PipeWire multimedia server - modules
ii  pipewire:amd64                        0.3.51-1
  amd64        audio and video processing engine multimedia server
ii  pipewire-bin                          0.3.51-1
  amd64        PipeWire multimedia server - programs
ii  pipewire-media-session                0.4.1-2
 amd64        example session manager for PipeWire
ii  pipewire-pulse                        0.3.51-1
  amd64        PipeWire PulseAudio daemon
ii  pulseaudio                            15.0+dfsg1-4
  amd64        PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-module-bluetooth           15.0+dfsg1-4
  amd64        Bluetooth module for PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-utils                      15.0+dfsg1-4
  amd64        Command line tools for the PulseAudio sound server
ii  vlc-plugin-pipewire:amd64             3-1
 amd64        PipeWire audio plugins for VLC

Thanks!

On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 9:51 PM Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> wrote:

> Control: reassign -1 gnome-shell
> Control: tags -1 + moreinfo
>
> On Tue, 31 May 2022 at 20:02:39 +0200, Claudio wrote:
> > My system does not react to Volume Up/Down/Mute events, but still
> > reacts to Play/Pause/Previous/Next.
>
> dbus is not responsible for generating events or reacting to events,
> only delivering messages generated by something else, so this is very
> unlikely to be a dbus bug. You implied that your UI is gnome-shell,
> so I'm sending the bug report there for now, but I think it might be
> working as designed.
>
> > Trying to trace the event I checked GNOME keybindings; the UI recognizes
> > the Audio Raise/Lower/Mute Volume inputs when binding the keys, but
> > nothing happens when I try to use them
>
> I believe the way volume keys are meant to work in GNOME is that
> gnome-shell receives the keyboard events and uses them to control the
> overall volume in PulseAudio (or Pipewire if you have pipewire-pulse
> installed).
>
> The reason MPRIS is necessary is that for events like play/pause, there
> is no reasonable thing that gnome-shell can do on its own: the only thing
> it can usefully do is pass the event on to your active media player,
> and hope it can do something useful in response. That isn't the case for
> volume control, which gnome-shell can deal with in an app-independent way:
> regardless of whether you are playing music through a MPRIS media player,
> playing sounds from a non-MPRIS source like a game, both, or neither,
> the Shell changes the volume level directly, which will result in media
> players, games, system sounds and all other sound sources getting louder
> or quieter as appropriate.
>
> So I think this is probably working as designed, unless the volume is
> not actually changing (in which case that would be a problem with the
> interaction between gnome-shell and pulseaudio).
>
> > xev does not recognize any
> > XF86Audio* events (volume or play/pause/etc.).
>
> If you're using gnome-shell in its default Wayland mode, any key that is
> grabbed by gnome-shell is not going to be visible to the X11 emulation
> provided by Xwayland, and therefore not visible to xev. That's working
> as designed. For applications, the result of pressing volume up/down keys
> should be indistinguishable from the result of dragging the GUI volume
> slider: either way, the representation is "volume changed".
>
>     smcv
>
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