I have a script for recording TV programs from my TV card which mucks around with the ALSA devices and then launches mencoder to record the program. I terminate a recording by killing the script, which causes it to clean up. Sometimes, when I have cron jobs set up to record two programs one right after the other, the second recording task starts up immediately after the previous has finished. When this happens, mencoder fails to open the audio device: Thu Oct 4 21:00:02 EDT 2007: Executed as /home/jik/scripts/record 5 /home/jik/.freevo/recordings/10-04_21_00_Grey_s_Anatomy_-_Love_Addiction.avi Thu Oct 4 21:00:02 EDT 2007: Starting /usr/bin/mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:adevice=hw.0,0:alsa:forceaudio:audiorate=32000:amode=1:norm=NTSC-M:input=0:chanlist=us-bcast:channel=5:width=768:height=576:outfmt=yuy2:device=/dev/video1:brightness=54:contrast=26:saturation=50:hue=50:buffersize=64 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=4000:keyint=30 -idx -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=128:cbr:mode=3 -ffourcc divx -vf pp=md/de,phase=U -o /home/jik/.freevo/recordings/10-04_21_00_Grey_s_Anatomy_-_Love_Addiction.avi -quiet Thu Oct 4 21:00:02 EDT 2007: child PID is 20114 Thu Oct 4 21:00:03 EDT 2007: Waiting for /usr/bin/mencoder (20114) MEncoder SVN-r23784 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz (Family: 15, Model: 4, Stepping: 1) CPUflags: Type: 15 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1 Compiled with runtime CPU detection. success: format: 9 data: 0x0 - 0x0 TV file format detected. Selected driver: v4l2 name: Video 4 Linux 2 input author: Martin Olschewski <olschewski.de> comment: first try, more to come ;-) Selected device: Hauppauge WinTV 34xxx models Tuner cap: Tuner rxs: Capabilites: video capture VBI capture device tuner read/write streaming supported norms: 0 = PAL-BG; 1 = PAL-DK; 2 = PAL-I; 3 = PAL-M; 4 = PAL-N; 5 = PAL-Nc; 6 = PAL-60; 7 = NTSC-M; 8 = NTSC-M-JP; 9 = NTSC-443; 10 = SECAM-DK; 11 = SECAM-L; inputs: 0 = Television; 1 = for debug only; 2 = Composite1; 3 = S-Video; Current input: 0 Current format: BGR24 v4l2: current audio mode is : STEREO Selected channel: 5 (freq: 77.250) Error opening audio: Device or resource busy Error opening audio: Device or resource busy Error opening audio: Device or resource busy v4l2: 0 frames successfully processed, 0 frames dropped. Thu Oct 4 21:00:03 EDT 2007: Finished with /usr/bin/mencoder (20114) If I pause for just a second before launching the recording script, this doesn't happen. This also didn't happen before I replaced esound with pulseaudio. It appears that there's some sort of race condition right after the device is closed where pulseaudio isn't prepared to accept new connections. This needs to be fixed, i think.
I am sorry, I don't get what this has to do with PA? The mencoder line you are using suggests that you are using ALSA natively, without going through PA (adevice=hw.0,0). And the first mencoder invocation works, but the second doesn't? But where does PA come into play here? Please elaborate!
Since I fail to see what this has to do with PA and I didn't get feedback for a month now, I will close the bug. Feel free to reopen, if the bug persists and you still believe it's PA's fault.
I did some more research, and you're right, this is not a pulseaudio bug. I don't know why it seemed to start happening when I switched from esound to pulseaudio, but in any case, the root cause was actually an issue with my driver script which I've addressed. Sorry to have bothered you.