Multimedia problems with ubuntu...

If you, like me, have problems with multimedia under Ubuntu (Karmic at least), try these little tricks before anything. I hope they will help.

First of all, take a look medibuntu repositories. That alone solves a lot of problems.And if are upgrading from old versions of Linux, clean up the audio configuration.

After that, try to set the sound system in use to pulse audio. I had various program with a different setup, like ALSA or OSS, and that creates a lot of problems. That was the case, for example, for Skype and for VirtualBox. Setting the input and output to pulse audio  solved their problems.

I found some more problem using KDE application under gnome — like kdenlive or amarok, which had sound stuttering and/or no sound at all. For these, the problem was a missing dependency that was not brought in automatically. Kdenlive needed libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio, and amarok needed  libxine1-ffmpeg and phonon-backend-xine. After that, all was well.