[SOLVED] Cantata and Plasma Media Player widget

[quarkslot]

Just recently Cantata and the Plasma Media Player widget have become disconnected on my system. Previously when I played music in Cantata the Media Player widget would load in the system tray and display track information, and the media keys on my keyboard worked seamlessly with Cantata (play/pause/next/previous). This no longer happens.

I re-installed Cantata which fixed the problem but that proved to be a false dawn as it came back after the next reboot and subsequent re-installs do not even fix the problem temporarily.

Does anyone have any ideas what I might try in order to get the two working together again?

Thanks

Nick

[woodsmoke]

Hi
this is an interesting question.

I have a lot of experience with PMC because i use it in my Kparadigmshift ...roll your own version of KDE Neon dev stable .. for my large screen t.v.

I assume that, as you are using PMC that you are somewhat aware of it's history and that it has gone in fits and starts for some odd reason and that is, because, I personally think, that the whole plasma active thing for tablets was never completely developed because, in part, they use the ARM chipset. That MAY be the reason, I do not know.

You will notice in this link that PMC isn't even mentioned:

https://userbase.kde.org/Applications/Multimedia

but as to your situation.

I have a LOT of media players on my rig but, i do not have Cantata, although I DO KNOW A LOT about Cantata because I have been an active proponent of "down to the bone" players ( music servers ) such as the old XMMS, not XMMS2, and also MPD when I was running #!.

But, anyway, I fiddled with Cantata a lot and can UNDERSTAND why you like it!

But, again, back to your situation.

Here is a relevant item from the PMC site, which has not been updated since 2014 I think:

Media Player

It is a QML component that uses Phonon QML to play Audio/Video and show Images.

So, just to verify, I checked the server for my PMC and the phonon backend showing for me is VLC.

So, what I am getting at is

a) that it "may be" that PMC was set up by the devs with the thought of using VLC as the player.
b) I do not have Cantata on my rig and it is using VLC.

I DID NOT CHOOSE...VLC, I almost always "go stock" for these kinds of things.

c) it may be that PMC was intended for use with VLC in phonon but that it will seek a player and pick the "best fit".

So there are then several questions:
a) is your PMC "stock" in that it "found whatever backend in phonon was set BY THE SYSTEM"?
c) Do you have VLC on the system and decided to change from VLC to Cantata?

I...ASSUME that the reason that MY...Phonon is using VLC is becase it was either "avaialble" or that "the devs wanted it" but I did not choose VLC to be the back end for Phonon

d) so, if you did purposely choose Cantata and VLC is available you might try changing the backend for Phonon to VLC.
e) if you did not purposely choose it but it is the only player available to Phonon you might try installing VLC and check to see if:

i) PMC and the rest of the system get together and change the backend of Phonon to VLC
ii) you change Phonon to use VLC

and then use VLC for the backend for Phonon to then monitor to determine if the situation is solved.

this was a LONG COMPLICATED POST but it is all that I can think of.

wood if it doesn't work come back and others will try to help I am sure smoke

[quarkslot]

First a big thank you for your reply.

I pretty much use stock Kubuntu, though for the first time ever last year I decided to stick with LTS since I now use this machine as a work computer. In LTS Cantata is the default music player and VLC the default media player.

So, like you, I usually "go stock" unless I've a good reason not to. I like Cantata, it's lean and works well for me so I stuck with it, plus it worked out-of-the-box with PMC.

However for whatever reason my dual monitor set-up and VLC didn't get on, my system became unresponsive and crashed when I tried video playback. So I pretty much purged VLC from my system sometime last year, as far as I can tell there are only a couple of library files remaining.

It's worth mentioning that I didn't make any changes to the backend for Cantata, unless the system did it when I removed VLC. I think it's still using the MPD music server.

Anyway, to finish off, while I was writing this email I decided to fire up Cantata, I pressed the "play" key on my keyboard and guess what - the music started to play! Plus the applet appeared in the system tray.

So it appears I'm now in that wonderful "intermittent problem" situation (unless something got fixed in a recent update).

I'll see what happens and if it goes wrong again I'll start down the path you suggested.

Thanks again.

[oshunluvr]

Maybe what you're seeing is the system tray hiding the icon when the player is not active? This is commonly how many apps work in systray.

With Catana not playing, right-click on the arrow (triangle thingy) in systray and select "Configure...". Click on "Entries" tab and you should see Catana in there. You can change visibility from "Auto" to "Shown" if you like.

[woodsmoke]

Quarkslot
you post just gave me a clue about something.

I really had quite forgotten about VLC being the back end of PMC and lately I have had a situation of VLC playing "once" and then not responding to being invoked a second time without going to Ksysguard and issuing a kill command.

BUT...now I think it is because it may be invoked under PMC and there is a setting for "one instance"...

Just goes to show that great heads can do stuff even if mine is cabbage!.

woodthankssmoke

[quarkslot]

Thanks guys, all is well here.

I suspect something broke on an update and has now been fixed.

If it goes wrong again I'll follow-up with your suggestions.

Share and share alike woodsmoke!