Rhythmbox on OpenBSD

I’ve been looking for a good media player to use with my OpenBSD desktop.

I personally like lightweight players that are focused towards dynamic playlist creation (eg: play all of one genre at once)

Rhythmbox is a great piece of software that should fit these requirements.

Getting it onto OpenBSD was difficult - the existing port was in a non-functioning state. After porting totem-pl-playlist and updating the rhythmbox port, it was in a compilable state. Playing about with lib requirements got me to a point where I could actually play tracks.

The downside is that performance is horrible, I don’t know whether it’s because the audio subsystem on OpenBSD is just rubbish, or because of gstreamer, or rhythmbox itself.

As I type this, every newline and backspace causes a slight break in play of the song. Changing desktop workspaces or windows is much worse.

Annoying to the point it isn’t unusable.

VLC is an alternative, although it doesn’t have the nice library features, it does have a good performance. The issue there is that it plays at the wrong sample rate - all the songs are too high pitched!

I really don’t want to use Arts or esound, but it may be unavoidable to fix the performance issues.

3 Responses to “Rhythmbox on OpenBSD”

  1. Philip says:

    I have a simple answer for you, but you’re not gonna like it:

    go ANALOGUE!!!!!!

    use a RADIO

  2. Philip says:

    oh and merry christmas

  3. Tom says:

    Ah, but I do use a radio, it’s also plugged into my speakers.

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