Bugzilla – Bug 1214403
Bluetooth stack will often choose a really poor codec (mono, audibly low bitrate) when on different distribution it was fine
Last modified: 2023-11-21 02:59:02 UTC
OpenSUSE's bluetooth and audio stack will often choose a really poor codec (mono, audibly low bitrate) with my Anker Soundcore Life Q30 headphones when on different distribution it was fine. Also, randomly shooting down pulseaudio and bluetoothd and disconnecting and reconnecting will fix it at some point, but possibly lead to other issues down the line like things no longer properly reconnecting on their own, it's a total mess. Since this worked on a different Linux distribution with the same hardware, this seems to be some sort of problem specifically with how the bluetooth and audio stack is configured on OpenSUSE and not e.g. a hardware or radio interference problem. I'm seeing this on the GNOME desktop, which I also used previously with the other distribution. Also, switching through all codec choices in pavucontrol doesn't fix it, which makes this even more annoying.
Try to switch from pulseaudio to pipewire. Basically installing pipewire-pulseaudio should be enough, then it'll remove and install different ones. Also, there are a few other stuff in Packman repo, too.
I tested more and restarting pulseaudio is enough to fix it. On the other linux distribution I tried pipewire once and it did an even buggier worse job with bluetooth, with pulseaudio it worked fine. Sadly less so on OpenSUSE right now.
Nowadays pipewire works quite stably. Try it out and report back if you still have issues about BT. The development of PA has stalled and the better support for BT isn't expected for now.
I've heard that a lot about Pipewire but I tested this about 6 months ago, so it doesn't seem to quite hold up. Every time I tried to switch to it, I ran into quite a few showstopper issues so far. But I guess if leap switches the default in the next big release I'll end up using it eventually, I'm just really not in a hurry.
Sure, it's up to you. Also, this might be rather in BT layer, not the PA. And for BT, it could be a firmware problem, a problem of bluez, or a problem of BT kernel driver, or even a problem of runtime power management. Such a problem is really hard to debug without the actual machine. You can try to upgrade bluez stuff to the latest one that is available in OBS multimedia:libs repo. For easy update, you can try my project OBS home:tiwai:leap-15.5:update, which builds the selected packages from OBS multimedia:libs.
Upgrading to slowroll and then switching to pipewire actually seems to have fixed this for now.