Update to OS 12.3 causing problems to VLC addon / VLC-Telnet integration

[LeoCal]

Describe the issue you are experiencing

After updating to OS 12.3, I started facing issue with VLC addon / VLC Telnet integration.
More specifically, I get an intermittent and chopping sound, which has never occurred to me in several years using VLC.
It seems multiple users are facing a similar issue, as reported to VLC addon as well: home-assistant/addons#3594

Here's the details of my HA setup:
Core: 2024.5.3
Supervisor: 2024.05.1
Operating System: 12.3
Frontend: 20240501.1

What operating system image do you use?

rpi4-64 (Raspberry Pi 4/400 64-bit OS)

What version of Home Assistant Operating System is installed?

Home Assistant OS 12.3

Did you upgrade the Operating System.

Yes

Steps to reproduce the issue

1. Upgrade to OS 12.3
2. Try to reproduce a sound through the VLC addon with VLC Telnet integration
3. Notice how sound is chopping and intermittent

Anything in the Supervisor logs that might be useful for us?

You can refer to the issue reported to the VLC addon for more logs from me and other users:
https://github.com/home-assistant/addons/issues/3594

Anything in the Host logs that might be useful for us?

You can refer to the issue reported to the VLC addon for more logs from me and other users:
https://github.com/home-assistant/addons/issues/3594

System information

No response

Additional information

No response

[sakirsek]

I have this problem too. Still no solution?

[LeoCal]

AFAIK, unfortunately no solution yet :-(

[GunterAv]

Hello,

the same with HAOS: 12.4

I found an alternative solution (without VLC)
https://smarterkram.de/6217/ (In German)
Also works with short mp3 files.

Best regards
Gunter

[LeoCal]

Yes, I also have an MPD based addon that works fine, but ideally this needs to be fixed in VLC addon as that's part of the Home Assistant "official add-ons".

[GunterAv]

Hello,

I'm right there with you.
But I need the sound output via the RasPi output and didn't want to wait any longer.

Greetings

[Grafton1046]

Throwing my hat into the ring, it's not just raspberry Pi's.
After the update 12.4 I'm not able to get any sound out of my setup, running baremetal with x86-64

[FadilAbdulla]

I also have the issue since I updated to 2024.5

[rodolfoleo]

I had the same problem on 12.3 so I downgraded to 12.2 and the audio was fixed.

Anybody knows if OS 13 still presents this issue?

[GunterAv]

in 13.0 the proplem was NOT fixed.

[basvdijk]

I experience the same on my RPI4 and noticed a very high cpu usage when playing audio or TTS. This might cause the stuttering sound.

When I reverted to HA OS 12.2 with ha os update --version 12.2 there is no issue

[bitbytie]

I'm also stuck on version 12.2 until this issue is resolved.
Is there anything I can do to help diagnose the root cause?

[sairon]

I had an opportunity to look at this issue a bit more in depth, and I'm afraid I don't have good news. The problem indeed happens only for VLC, which, when ran with debug logging, shows it has issues with synchronization and logs playback way too early ... playing silence or playback way too late ... playing silence couple of times. Playing audio using other tools (like ffplay) is fine. I checked and tried adjusting buffer values but it has no effect.

I have confirmed that Raspberry Pi OS has exact the same issue if PulseAudio and VLC is used. The problem only happens on latest (for RPi) 6.6 kernel, 6.1 is fine - and 12.2 to 12.3 was right where we updated to Raspberry Pi's current kernel.

Unfortunately, I don't have capacity to pursue this issue, these are the key information that could be used to report the issue upstream in raspberrypi/linux repo - install PulseAudio (it's not used as the default sound server though) on the latest RPi OS and try playing audio files with VLC. If the cause is found and resolved there, we can apply the fix to HAOS as well.