[bbarnett]

Using dmix, I don't think you're going to keep AC3/DTS passthrough.

A couple of things:

1) I don't know how you get this to allow you to select anything in XBMC. It doesn't seem to allow the selection of anything outside of a few options... and added asound.conf devices don't seem to be selectable

2) I tried this with mplayer. Mplayer worked with it, but of course no AC3/DTS. The passthrough *played*, but it's just audio passed through digital output.

Again, I don't think this is really working for you, except that it plays now. And seems to work. EG AC3/DTS is lost, as least for me.

Thanks for the try though. It would be nice if XBMC just worked, like mplayer, xine, vlc, alsaplayer, etc do.

[kwes]

I had the same problems and tried this last night. No success. But the problem seemed to be Pulseaudio.

If I tried to play a movie with dts sound while I had optical audio and dts capable reciever checked I got no sound and double speed video. Stereo audio worked fine (also from the dts movies when I unchecked dts capable reciever). In the audio settings I had no other passtrough devices to chose from than "Default (pulseaudio)"
After I uninstalled pulseaudio and rebooted the machine, xbmc gave me the ALSA-devices to chose from in the settings and voila - passtrough now works.

And I am using the asound.conf above. With the addition that I set that device to default also. Not sure if the asound.conf helped but at least it did not break anything. And I do get surround sound (dts), not only stereo. The display on the amp changes from PCM to DTS and sound plays from all speakers.

Ubuntu 12.04 and XBMC Frodo 12.2