Recently I upgraded my work laptop from Xubuntu 13.04 to 13.10. The upgrade went well, except for an issue with audio output from VidyoDesktop. Every other application worked fine. Skype, audio from Flash inside both Firefox and Chromium, gmusicbrower, Rhythmbox, and the system sounds all performed as expected.

After spending a day spelunking the depths of PulseAudio, a co-worker pointed me to this bug report which links to this blog post about making Skype compatible with changes in PulseAudio 4.0.

I confirmed that manually starting Vidyo with the following command re-enabled audio:

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 VidyoDesktop

And then modified the Exec line in /etc/xdg/autostart/vidyo-vidyodesktop.desktop to this:

Exec=env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 VidyoDesktop -AutoStart

The non-autostart menu file (/usr/share/applications/vidyo-vidyodesktop.desktop) just needs the following:

Exec=env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 VidyoDesktop

We’re using version 2.2.x of the VidyoDesktop client, which I believe has been superseded and so you may not need this fix at if you use a later client version.