I remember when I used SuSE, they had set up the Helix engine in amaroK. This worked very well and was compatible with any media format I threw at it. In Kubuntu, the Xine engine is used in amaroK. Now the Xine engine is good, but it just seems to crash no matter what front end I use. Kaffeine is the worst culprit, but amarok has crashed a few time today as well. I have a feeling that one of my songs may be responsible, but I am getting tired anyway. I can't find any instructions for installing the amarok-helix engine. Theres nothing in the repositories and a Google search came up fruitless. Is the amarok-helix partnership unique to SuSE only, or can it be used in other distibutions? PS - Oh lord, amarok just crashed again whilst I was typing this
It sounds like Kubuntu is using either some broken version of the Xine engine or else there is something configurationally wrong with your system. I use the Xine engine with the ALSA output plugin and Amarok never crashes for me, and additionally I can play any audio format I want -- the Xine engine has nothing to do with either. You must have the audio libraries in order to play a specific filetype, that's all there is to it.
If you can't find it in your repositories, it's probably not in there. But like I said, amaroK is awesome with the Xine engine as long as you configure it to use the ALSA output plugin, not ARTS. ARTS is a horrible sound engine, and in fact if you're running KDE you should change the default sound engine from ARTS to ALSA as illustrated here:
Whoops, I switched to the arts engine yesterday and forgot to set it back to Xine :O Yeah, I was just curious to see if ARTs is any good. What are your thoughts on Gstreamer?
I know people who like it, but the general consensus is that the best plugin for amaroK presently is Xine/ALSA. As for my opinion, I'd place Gstreamer somewhere between Xine and ARTS.
I read somewhere that GStreamer 0.10 is to become the default engine for KDE4/amaroK 2.0. Whether or not it's true, I don't know. I used Gstreamer in Kaffiene when I first installed Breezy, but I had to swap it for Xine as it doesn't support DVB.
Yeah, ARTs has a habit of crashing when a song skips to the next one BTW, I've managed to set up the Helix Engine in amarok I downloaded the SuSE package and converted it with Alien. I had to configure the Realplayer paths manually in amarok and once I did that it worked! Just one question though, I can't seem to use ALSA with the Helix Engine. I get an error message that says Code: 'The helix library you have configured does not support ALSA, the helix-engine has fallen back to OSS'. Do you know why this could be and is it a bad thing to use OSS?
OSS is lagacy garbage. ALSA has completely obsoleted it, in fact I compile OSS completely out of my kernels and simply use the OSS compatibility emulation in ALSA for those old-school apps that still need OSS support. The Suse version of HelixPlayer has probably been compiled for OSS.
It's all good news in the final episode of 'megamaced Vs Xine' Re-installation of Kubuntu and manual setup of audio codecs (i.e. not easyUbuntu) seems to have solved it. :good:
