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Troubleshooting Media and Playback

In a nutshell

This page is the deep dive for Stage 7 of Troubleshooting & Debugging: what to check when a media request ("play some jazz") matched but nothing plays. It covers empty search results, stream extraction failures, and audio-sink problems. For hardware-level mic/speaker checks, see Troubleshooting → Prove the microphone and speaker work instead.

Log: audio.log (service ovos-audio, or ovos-media if enabled). Bus filter: ovos.common_play.query / ovos.common_play.query.response, ovos.common_play.status

This stage only applies to media requests ("play some jazz", "next song"), not plain spoken answers. It starts once Stage 4 has already matched the utterance to the OCP pipeline (ovos-ocp-pipeline-plugin-high / -medium / -low). If OCP never claims the utterance at all, that is a Stage 4 problem, not a Stage 7 one: check the pipeline miss log described there first.

(a) Search found nothing

Once OCP classifies the utterance as a playback request, it emits ovos.common_play.query and collects ovos.common_play.query.response results from every installed OCP-enabled media skill. If no skill answers, or every answer is empty, OVOS reports it found nothing to play.

Checks:

  • Is an OCP-enabled media skill actually installed and loaded? Skills act purely as catalogs here, so with none installed there is nothing to search. See Media Skills (OCP).
  • Watch the query round-trip live in ovos-busmon: filter by ovos.common_play.query* to confirm the query went out and see which skills (if any) answered, and with what results.
  • Reproduce it without speaking: ovos-say-to "play some jazz" (see Troubleshooting Stage 3), then check skills.log for the matching skill's search handler.

(b) A result was found but the stream never starts

A search result is only a candidate URI. Before OCP can play it, a stream extractor has to resolve that URI to the real, directly-playable stream (this is what the ovos-ocp-*-plugin packages, e.g. ovos-ocp-youtube-plugin or ovos-ocp-bandcamp-plugin, do). If the matching extractor is missing, misconfigured, or the remote service it scrapes changes shape, extraction fails and playback never begins even though a result was found.

Check audio.log (the audio service, which hosts the OCP audio plugin by default, or ovos-media's own log if that daemon is enabled instead) for an extractor exception around the time of the request. See OCP Plugins Reference for which extractor handles which source, and confirm the right one is installed for the kind of link the skill returned.

© Audio plays on the wrong output, or not at all

If a stream extracted fine but nothing (or the wrong device) makes sound, this is the same class of problem as Troubleshooting Stage 6's audio sink failure, not a media-specific bug:

  • Run the hardware and mixer checks in Troubleshooting → Prove the microphone and speaker work (aplay -l, alsamixer, wpctl status / pactl list short sinks) to confirm the speaker is present, unmuted, and set as the default sink.
  • Check the OCP backend's audio configuration: the preferred_audio_services order it uses to pick a lower-level backend (shipped default mpv, vlc, simple), described in OCP Audio Plugin. A missing or misconfigured backend in that list can leave OCP with nothing to hand the stream to.

In ovos-busmon, filter by ovos.common_play.status to see the player's own state (playing, paused, stopped) regardless of whether sound is actually audible, useful for telling apart "OCP thinks it's playing" (an audio sink problem) from "OCP never started playing" (extractor or search problem, (a)/(b) above).

Read next: Troubleshooting & Debugging Related: OCP Pipeline · Media Skills (OCP) · OCP Plugins Reference · OCP Audio Plugin