Bug#791735: vlc: VLC no longer works without pulseaudio

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Tue, 7 Jul 2015 16:27:12 -0600 Akkana Peck <akkzilla at shallowsky.com> wrote:
> Package: vlc
> Version: 2.2.1-2+b1
> Severity: important
> 
> VLC suddenly is no longer able to play audio on systems that don't
> have pulseaudio installed. When I run it on an mp3 file --
> vlc filename.mp3 from the commandline -- it prints on stdout:
> 
> PulseAudio server connection failure

VLC has been doing that ever since it had PulseAudio support (provided that 
the PulseAudio plugin is installed). That never prevented falling back to 
plain ALSA.

> and then just sits there doing nothing. Clicking the play button
> does nothing. It also won't exit: clicking the windowmanager dismiss
> button sometimes makes the window go away, sometimes not, but either
> way it doesn't return control to the terminal where I started it.

That´s most probably got nothing to do with PulseAudio. Without logs and stack 
trace, it is just impossible to guess what went wrong.

> And it would be nice if it gave the user a real error message
> instead of just doing nothing, and exited gracefully without needing
> kill -9.

When a program locks up, it locks up. Not much to do about it.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/