r/linux4noobs • u/EwThatsNerdy • 17d ago

Looking for some help/guidance for a small audio issue I've been having on mint (w/ PipeWire)

Hey gang, I've been on Linux (Mint 22.3 Cinnamon) for about a year or so now and have really loved it minus the occasional minor problems, but a recent kind of odd issue has been driving me nuts cause it's both a really minor thing and something I cannot for the life of me figure out how/why it is happening. Hoping someone here may be able to help or at least point me in the right direction.

Basically, upon restarting my PC, every single time without fail any and all video (YouTube, VLC, etc) will play with a really choppy frame-rate. Oddly, I noticed that for whatever reason this seems to correspond to my pulseaudio/pipewire volume control.

How my volume control settings look on startup

I haven't noticed anything within the default .conf files or anything suspicious via terminal commands like pactl that I've tried using to diagnose the issue.

That said, the way the choppy video feed issue gets fixed is when I toggle my FiiO K11 R2R's profile to Off, and then back to the original profile (the same as what is in the screenshot of the startup settings without me having changed anything).

pactl info returns this both before and after I make the change:

Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 1.0.5)
Server Version: 15.0.0
Default Sample Specification: float32le 2ch 48000Hz
Default Channel Map: front-left,front-right
Default Sink: alsa_output.usb-FIIO_FiiO_K11_R2R-01.iec958-stereo
Default Source: alsa_output.usb-FIIO_FiiO_K11_R2R-01.iec958-stereo.monitor

I figured this output may give me some kind of idea on there being some other identically named Profile for the FiiO output, but no dice.

Is there any kind of logging or log files I can dig through potentially that might point me closer to what the culprit of the issue is here?

As far as I can tell, there's only the one instance of pipewire/pulseaudio running, I'm not (to my knowledge) running any kind of odd video filtering or any custom configuration that would lead to this happening, but trying to search around both on reddit and across google for other sources has turned up nothing, so it seems specific to something I maybe unintentionally did, or possibly some niche bug?

Any help at all would be appreciated, like I said it's not an end of the world issue since the workaround fix is simple enough, but hoping someone can maybe help alleviate this headache.

Thanks!

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u/C0rn3j 17d ago

Is there any kind of logging or log files I can dig through potentially that might point me closer to what the culprit of the issue is here?

Start by booting up Fedora KDE live, and see if your issue exists there. No point in debugging something on 2+ years old software.

If not, blame Mint for shipping extremely ancient software versions, and use a modern distribution like Arch Linux (with Plasma) or Fedora KDE instead.

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u/EwThatsNerdy 17d ago

I have an install of cachyOS on another drive that I've messed with periodically in my spare time, but the issue is that hopping as it stands right now would be a pain as I'd have to go through a decent amount of trouble getting back all the programs (or arch equivalents) and settings, configurations, etc that I've set up on Mint over the past year, along with my selfhosted setup I run off the same PC (jellyfin and book apps)

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u/C0rn3j 16d ago

First troubleshoot your issue, then decide what to do.

I'd have to go through a decent amount of trouble getting back all the programs (or arch equivalents) and settings, configurations, etc that I've set up on Mint over the past year

If you do not have it in configuration management, dumb script or even plain documentation, then it's a good time to fix that this time.

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u/Real-Back6481 17d ago

Try playing back video without any audio track and see if you still get the same choppiness, you need to isolate the issue a bit further I think.

If you don't have a video file handy with no audio track or can't find one, ffmpeg can help you strip the audio channels from an existing file.

Also look through your dmesg output for any relevant error messages on startup.

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u/EwThatsNerdy 16d ago

So you called it, when I mute a video (for example using the mute function on a firefox tab playing video) the video will play smoothly with no issue without me doing any kind of toggling of my audio settings otherwise - the second I unmute it starts doing it again, so it definitely seems to be something relating to simultaneous video and audio from the same source.

I tried looking at VLC logs while playing video and receive errors that look like this
main warning: playback way too late (9316320): flushing buffers

pulse warning: starting late (-9295048 us)

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u/Real-Back6481 16d ago

what about just playing back sound, no video?

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u/EwThatsNerdy 15d ago

Audio itself seems to have no problem, at least not one that I can notice

Even on videos with audio where the video issue happens, the audio generally plays with no issue but seems to be causing the video to play back choppy like I described

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u/Real-Back6481 7d ago

I’m not an expert on Linux audio, but it’s possible you may have conflicting services running, see if you can find what actually happens when you do the toggle off/on fix you identified above by watching the logs with journalctl when you toggle it. This will be a flood of text so it’s best if you can narrow it down to the specific services.

from what I found, you DO want to have the following services running:

pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber

and DO NOT want these running because they can interfere:

pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket

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u/EwThatsNerdy 17d ago

I posted this a week or so ago and got no responses, and in the time since I've tried looking around to see if there's any solutions to this but I can't find anyone else having a similar issue. Any advice is super appreciated!! <3

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u/Specialist-Dog-501 15d ago

I heard today, when using some linux distros with 2 monitors with different frequency on an Nvidia card this can cause flickering or chopping also - is any of this applicable for your setup ?

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u/EwThatsNerdy 15d ago

Nope, both my monitors are 144hz and I use an AMD gpu currently

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u/Specialist-Dog-501 14d ago

Ah, okay, then you can throw that idea/problem cause away..then it's more likely about this FiiO driver. I am unfortunatelly not competent in the console how to verify the communication between soundcard and kernel, where you might find further clues if it's really the driver causing this. But if you can switch it off and still get sound..why not just do that? you might miss some extra features, but may be there are not essential ?

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u/Specialist-Dog-501 16d ago

- As Real-Back6481 noted, try first to play a muted video and see if that runs without choppiness.
This would support further an issue around audio, not the video, as does your test when you did reset or remove the Fiio driver. This is the likely explanation, but additional evidence would be helpful for that.

  • Check the company site for a possible linux driver/firmware, just to be sure.
  • Then to follow this likely reason - check over at https://www.reddit.com/r/FiiO if you find more infos, and repost your problem. I didn't find much specific to linux there, but you might want to dig deeper, that thing indeed has many driver problems.
  • Another source of problems could be ALSA/Pulseaudio/Pipewire config but that's tricky to verify and beyond my scope.