[arch-general] virt-manager/spicy: no audio unless I start pulseaudio

[Kyle Terrien]

Summary: Why is there no audio in the spice viewer if PulseAudio is not
running?

I have been battling muted audio in virt-manager for some time.  I
finally figured out that it is really a spice viewer problem (spicy)
rather than a QEMU problem.

The problem is that spicy does not output any audio unless I have
PulseAudio setup and running.  If I attempt to run spicy from a terminal
and connect to a VM (running Fedora 23), I get warnings like the
following when I am not running PulseAudio:

GSpice-WARNING **: PulseAudio context failed Connection refused
GSpice-WARNING **: pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

And there is no sound.  If I launch PulseAudio and try again, there is
sound.

It looks like at one point the '--with-audio=gstreamer' configure
parameter was added to spice-gtk3 [0].  However, it was reverted a few
weeks later [1].  So, I have a couple questions:

- Why was the reversion necessary?  There is a forum post on that bug
where someone has the complete opposite problem I am having.
- Is there some way to make spicy output sound without PulseAudio as a
dependency?

I have filed a bug on spicy's bugtracker [2], and a developer claims
that by switching '--with-audio' to gstreamer, it is possible to make
sound output work on both PulseAudio and plain ALSA.  I have tried
recompiling with '--with-audio=gstreamer', but I was not able to get
sound output in plain ALSA.  Has anyone had success recompiling with
'--with-audio=gstreamer'?

Any insight to the root of the problem would be appreciated.

--Kyle Terrien

[0] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/41492
[1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/41740
[2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93544

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