Hello,

On Android if you have music playing in background and they you start podcast player or YouTube it would pause the background music player. Why don't we have such a feature on desktop? I usually have my music player playing in background at a very low level but if I want to watch YouTube I have to go stop background music player and then watch or listen through other media players.

Thanks.

Because YouTube (and your browser) don't use the same underlying music engine as your music player (which you didn't specify, so wild guess), as simple as that.

Mamarok wrote:Because YouTube (and your browser) don't use the same underlying music engine as your music player (which you didn't specify, so wild guess), as simple as that.

You could take any 2 music players from KDE camp itself for example Amarok and Juk. You could play music on both players at the same time.

I guess that feature is simply not implemented. I would expect this to be done in Pulseaudio rather than Phonon, so not really a KDE problem. Did you check the Pulseaudio bugs list if there already is a feature request for that?

Mamarok wrote:I guess that feature is simply not implemented. I would expect this to be done in Pulseaudio rather than Phonon, so not really a KDE problem. Did you check the Pulseaudio bugs list if there already is a feature request for that?

I bugged some nice folk at IRC #pulseaudio one of the possibility is Mutually Exclusive PulseAudio streams. I am not sure but this has to be implemented either on system level if they provide an audio API or baked into application. Mutually Exclusive PulseAudio seems to mute the music player but we would rather want to pause the application which the application will have to implement.

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/06/how-to-a ... -when.html
http://www.burtonini.com/wordpress/2013 ... o-streams/

So apparently it doesn't work with web browsers anyway. Since Amarok doesn't play sound itself (nor does Juk AFAIK) but let Phonon do that I wouldn't be surprised if this is already possible.

Technically that first needs support in gstreamer/vlc as phonon is not the owner of the pulse stream.

For the gstreamer backend of phonon one probably would just need to react to pause requests from the pipeline, which apparently doesn't happen yet.

For VLC it is probably impossible right now as VLC doesn't appear to support corking at all.

Corking entails pulse sending an event to the stream owner (which in our case is VLC or GStreamer) and the owner reacting to the corking request by pausing or whatever else they want to do on corking. In fact with VLC it would already be enough if it auto-paused as phonon(vlc) doesn't really need to be aware why it was paused; the entire playback API is designed to be used async anyway, so a correctly implemented application would react to muteness even when it didn't request muting itself. Alas since VLC doesn't seem to listen to cork requests at all that is the biggest problem here. Anyway, needs feature requests filed against both phonon gstreamer and phonon vlc and vlc on http://bugs.kde.org respectively https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/

apachelogger wrote:Technically that first needs support in gstreamer/vlc as phonon is not the owner of the pulse stream.

For the gstreamer backend of phonon one probably would just need to react to pause requests from the pipeline, which apparently doesn't happen yet.

For VLC it is probably impossible right now as VLC doesn't appear to support corking at all.

Corking entails pulse sending an event to the stream owner (which in our case is VLC or GStreamer) and the owner reacting to the corking request by pausing or whatever else they want to do on corking. In fact with VLC it would already be enough if it auto-paused as phonon(vlc) doesn't really need to be aware why it was paused; the entire playback API is designed to be used async anyway, so a correctly implemented application would react to muteness even when it didn't request muting itself. Alas since VLC doesn't seem to listen to cork requests at all that is the biggest problem here. Anyway, needs feature requests filed against both phonon gstreamer and phonon vlc and vlc on http://bugs.kde.org respectively https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/

Thank you, I didn't understand a lot of it but I have filed bugs against phonon-backend-gstreamer, vlc and Chromium.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346472
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/14444#ticket
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issu ... 1429717213

Well someone closed the bug ticket I filed at Videolan with worksforme tag. I don't know maybe I failed to explain in the bug report. This is super strange and I can't find a way to reply to the ticket.

https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/14444#no1

I came across this interesting feature of KDE Connect which pauses media player on my KDE box if I receive a phone call. This works for both VLC and Banshee. Not to mention it can also control them. There must be some infrastructure that allows one media player to pause another media player.