topic More audio blues in Operating System - OpenVMS

More audio blues

Paul Beaudoin — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 06:48:20 GMT

Gents,

My PWS 500 has stopped playing audio properly. It repeats short segements, much like a dirty CD. I restarted the software to no effect and then powered the box right off. This worked for a bit but then the problems reappeared. I assume I have a hardware fault and making this difficult, the sound stuff is on the motherboard. The system works fine other than this. My back-up has always been an AS255 box which I boot up to form a cluster with the PWS. I tested this ages ago (at VMS 7.3) and it worked fine then. Since, I have upgraded to 8.2 and now the (new) driver does not load. As near as I can tell, the same driver is used in both boxes and as this is a common system disk it should load (sys$user_config.dat entries work fine on the PSW)but it doesn't. The au device is not created. I checked the startups and all seems well and even tried running them manualy. No errors but also, no device.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Many thanks

Paul

Re: More audio blues

Hoff — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:45:29 GMT

Assuming this is not a hardware problem, do try to scrounge up the newest MMOV pieces you can find. Here is V2.2:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/mmov/index.html

The newest MMOV multimedia services kit looks to be V2.2-1 (DEC-AXPVMS-MMOV-V0202-1-1), but I don't see a download for that posted anywhere, and what is posted is V2.2. There are references to V2.2-1 and OpenVMS V8.* releases.

Re: More audio blues

Paul Beaudoin — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 03:27:27 GMT

Hoff

Many thanks for that. There was some confusion around the 7.3-2 to 8.2 upgrade and I ended up with MMOV 2.1 There were some indicators there was a 2.2 but I never found it.

You seem to be also suggesting that this is not necessarily a hardware fault? In any case, I'll install this and report back

Regards

Paul

Re: More audio blues

Hoff — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:10:54 GMT

Experience writing and debugging audio drivers -- for the DECtalk-related DECvoice widget, and not with the particular drivers used within MMOV -- has shown bugs lurking within audio device drivers can cause stuttering.

Again, assuming this is not a hardware problem... Which this very well could be.

Haven't looked for a pointer to V2.2-1, though Fred K. might well know where that kit is, or who might know.

Re: More audio blues

Paul Beaudoin — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 03:17:51 GMT

Hoff,

Well now I am stumped. I had the 2.2-1 kit already installed so on a whim, started it and it has now run for 14 hours without a stutter.
I can only assume that once your magic eye fell on this most trivial of problems, it thought the better of continuing. Either that or I have a latent hardware/software error. In either case, many thanks -

Paul