Hi,
I have been using XBMC for a year or two on Ubuntu 12.04. After upgrade to 14.04, playback of MKV files is broken. I am getting correct video (at least as far as I can see), correct sound effects, but voices are almost inaudible. They output faintly only on the left channel. I read all sorts of threads about people having audio problems, even somebody on a forum suggesting to hire actors to recreate the voices rather than fiddling around with the issue! I pretty lost hope of any simple solution after I read that.
VLC is playing back the MKV files fine, with correct audio. However, selection of a movie cannot be fully done with the keyboard like in XBMC. The best I can do is to type the movie name on the command-line, but the right shift on my wireless keyboard is wrongly placed, always confused with arrow keys, causing typing issues as soon as I need a / in the command line. Moreover, I found no shortcut keys to put VLC in full screen, set aspect ratio to 16:9, switch language, disable subtitles and even activate the menu bar. Alt, that used to so since years, now displays a search box similar to the Dashboard and thus seems a mapping to the Windows key. Probably reconfigurable, but I guess I would have to hack into xorg.conf and xmodmap, and that will break the next update.
I tried to upgrade to latest XBMC because maybe that will fix my audio issue for free. No avail. Now the XBMC PPA does not work anymore. After a few seconds, add-apt-repository responds with an error saying there is no such PPA and to check the name. I checked multiple times, I copy/pastes the name from XBMC's site, to no avail. Maybe the PPA is not available in 14.04.
So I would like to get a player similar to XBMC that would offer full keyboard navigation and be available from main repositories, not from PPAs which get out of sync. I could have waited a few weeks for the XBMC repo to be updated to 14.04, I should have checked this more carefully before dist-upgrading, but I am not ready to refrain from updating for months because of a PPA.
Before XBMC, I tried many different other players. MPlayer gave me good results, but I had to type the file names on the command line and sometimes, fast-forward or backward didn't work; was crashing the player or moving at start or end of file. Totem is a bit random. Sometimes it plays well, sometimes not, if I remember well no AC-3 passthrough. VLC is good, a bit more stable than MPlayer against the files I have, but the ncessity to use the command line and key functionalities not accessible with the keyboard annoy me. I gave a shot at MythTV: this is too heavy weight, the backend is accessing the hard drive CONSTANTLY and is incapable of any connection with the fronted.
Yes, I know about Mythbuntu and XBMCbuntu, but I would like to avoid a clean install for different reasons. First, my HTPC is hooked up to a 1080p HDTV and I need some larger fonts to operate the Linux box. These fonts are not set up by default when starting a live CD so reinstalling from scratch will be a real hassle for me. Moreover, I now have several hard drives in the machine and will have to set up their mount points one by one during installation. With the too small font, that will be hard, and sometimes, the installer crashes for one reason or another, and I usually have to do the mountpoint setup multiple times. Doing it post-install requires manual editing of /etc/fstab and copy/pasting of device UUIDs, which is tedious. Yes, everything is doable and if I am sure that will fix my HTPC, I will try it, but I would like to avoid time consuming guess work consisting of trying many Ubuntu variants or other Linux distributions.
Maybe I should try my luck with recompiling XBMC from source, but I really hate doing this because this takes too much time, usually this requires fixing dependencies issues and I even had, sometimes, to fix the build process and some souce files! And that completely bypasses the APT packaging system. If, later on, XBMC PPA becomes available again, I will be stuck with out-of-APT compiled files and probably won't be able to install any XBMC updates without clean reinstalling Ubuntu or recompiling again from source.
Any idea? Thanks in advance.
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