Audio/video won't play on 14.04 after power-on but works after restart

Question

Pretty much the same situation as in: Ubuntu's stopped playing music/video files & Youtube ... and it started happening around the same time this year, but for me 1-2 restarts always fix it. It just doesn't want to work when powering on. I've tried the answer from the above and it didn't solve it for me.

All I know for sure is that it stems from the audio chain, because it works without a restart if I switch to my TV's speakers as an output device in PulseAudio. So it's something to do with my Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS or the software components(?) used to talk to it.

As in the above, I already had gstreamer0.10-plugins-good, and I recently also installed ubuntu-restricted-extras as a potential fix. It didn't help.

Any other suggestions appreciated.

Answer 1

Well, I haven't found the exact cause, but I've narrowed it down to something simply taking longer to initialize at system startup than it used to; something that's needed to get my sound card in working order. So all I have to do is wait 1-2 minutes after logon (still need to test this more to find the real minimum) before I try playing any videos. Then it will work normally and not require a restart.