RPI 4 - HDMI audio dropping on the begining of videos

Question

I use a RP 4 with raspbian as a basic media center. It is running a mopidy music server using alsamixer. The sound via the HDMI is has no dropping. But with mp4s, large or small, the issue is the same. Using VLC, the video is fluid but the sound is dropping intermittently for the first 15 mins and then the sound stops dropping and as long I don't stop the video, the sound does ot drop. With MPlayer, the sound drops a lot less , but the video is dropping images and can start to drop sync. Watching a video stream from a website in Chromium has the same issues than VLC. Firefox ESR drops too.

The CPU does not peak above 40% and the SD card virtually empty. The services are virtually at 0% so the PI is not being pushed.

I cannot see any reason why the sound is intermittent at the beginning and that it stabilises. Does anyone have an idea? Thank you

Answer 1

This result works for me:

billybangleballs wrote: ↑
Sat Mar 07, 2020 2:36 pm
I've fixed it, an 'apt-get purge pulseaudio' followed by a reboot seems to have restored order to the universe, youtube plays in chromium and VLC works great.

How I managed to get pulseaudio installed is unknown, it may have snuck in while I was playing around trying to get bluetooth to pair with my BMS.

Anyway all is now good except I still haven't managed to get my BMS paired, at least I can watch videos with uninterrupted sound while I ponder the next part of my plan for world domination. 

FYI pulseaudio was removed when Stretch was released 30 months:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-stretch/