Pulse "ignoring" recording applications

[G-Known]

I installed Pulse Volume Control recently due to the near impossibility of recording sound through my current hardware and ALSA configurations. The problem is that if I run applications like: ffmpeg or RMD, it won't register under the recording tab and this works with gnome-sound-recorder. Documentations reveal that both of these recording softwares can be used with pulse, however none of them is effective in my case.

What should I do in order to make Pulse recognize that the applications are recording audio?

[Rexilion]

I see people invocing ffmpeg with '-f alsa -i pulse'. I guess you need to explicitly mention to ffmpeg that you want to use pulse. Same goes for RMD I guess.

[G-Known]

I see people invocing ffmpeg with '-f alsa -i pulse'. I guess you need to explicitly mention to ffmpeg that you want to use pulse. Same goes for RMD I guess.

That's the problem, I include "pulse" with my command but it said this: alsa @ 0x1a9a2e0 cannot open audio device pulse. Now, in RMD, you either use pulse audio control to identify the program or just type pulse into its recording device. BOTH failed in my case, in which the control isn't able to identify RMD and RMD itself cannot find the soundcard or configure it.

[Rexilion]

Can you confirm that pulse is properly working? I.e. running and accepting commands? Try VLC (or Totem?) to test this. Also run the ffmpeg command again, and post all the output here. Thanks.

[G-Known]

Can you confirm that pulse is properly working? I.e. running and accepting commands? Try VLC (or Totem?) to test this. Also run the ffmpeg command again, and post all the output here. Thanks.

PulseAudio process is running, when I run two applications that tries to play sound only one can have access to the sound card, I open up PulseAudio manager, it's connected to a client. So Pulse is indeed running. It's able to successfully identify certain applications such as Totem, System, Sound recorder as playback/recording devices.

ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i pulse -f x11grab -r 30 -s 1024x768 -i :0.0 -acodec pcm_s16le -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast -crf 0 -threads 0 output.mkv
ffmpeg version 0.7.13, Copyright (c) 2000-2011 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Jun 13 2012 14:14:09 with gcc 4.4.5
  configuration: --enable-libdc1394 --prefix=/usr --extra-cflags='-Wall -g ' --cc='ccache cc' --enable-shared --enable-libmp3lame --enable-gpl --enable-libvorbis --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libxvid --enable-postproc --enable-x11grab --enable-libgsm --enable-libtheora --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libx264 --enable-libspeex --enable-nonfree --disable-stripping --enable-avfilter --enable-libdirac --disable-decoder=libdirac --enable-libfreetype --enable-libschroedinger --disable-encoder=libschroedinger --enable-version3 --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libvpx --enable-librtmp --extra-libs=-lgcrypt --disable-altivec --disable-armv5te --disable-armv6 --disable-vis
  libavutil    50. 43. 0 / 50. 43. 0
  libavcodec   52.123. 0 / 52.123. 0
  libavformat  52.111. 0 / 52.111. 0
  libavdevice  52.  5. 0 / 52.  5. 0
  libavfilter   1. 80. 0 /  1. 80. 0
  libswscale    0. 14. 1 /  0. 14. 1
  libpostproc  51.  2. 0 / 51.  2. 0
ALSA lib pcm.c:2190:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM pulse
[alsa @ 0x9162e0] cannot open audio device pulse (No such file or directory)
pulse: Input/output error

[Rexilion]

I'm out of clues here. You should investigate the ffmpeg switches and dig further in that direction. Maybe ffmpeg does not have pulseaudio support (compiled?). Maybe you need to install another package for that? (plugin?)

[G-Known]

I'm out of clues here. You should investigate the ffmpeg switches and dig further in that direction. Maybe ffmpeg does not have pulseaudio support (compiled?). Maybe you need to install another package for that? (plugin?)

Hi,

Yes, indeed this is a stubborn case of highly complexity but this problem also occurred when recording with RMD (recordmydesktop), since it's not in active development, there's no sure way to know if the program is causing this. But this post will remain here until somebody (preferably someone seasonable) comes and resolve this issue.