[snicker]

OK, I am a bonehead. Now that that is out of the way...

Sound was working over HDMI, but I couldnt change volume with my microsoft mediacenter remote. So I thought I would try a different passthru. I didnt write down the original settings.

Now I figured I might as well switch to analog and run sound thru mu amp/stereo speakers since I couldnt figure out HDMI anyway. I cant figure that out either. I have onboard audio, and it is enable in bios. There are soooo many combinations in audio output. Also I am running on Ubuntu Server standalone so no desktop. Any help appreciated.

Also, if I have a show playing in the background, and I bring up the menu and change audio settings, should they take affect right away or do I have to navigate all the way back to the show in the menu and stop/resume? I have never figured out how to get the menu to go away if I bring it up while a show is playing without fully navigating back to the files location and resuming play.

aplay -l gives the following:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: CK804 [NVidia CK804], device 0: Intel ICH [NVidia CK804]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CK804 [NVidia CK804], device 2: Intel ICH - IEC958 [NVidia CK804 - IEC958]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

[snicker]

I found a post and followed it by setting the top setting to hdmi and the two lower to hw:1,3

HDMI sound now works, but I still can not change volume with the remote, it says passthrough in use. Any way to work around that? I really dont understand what passthrough is.

Now I just have to figure out how to get analog to work, I really want to use my amp and nicer speakers. I geuss thereee is no way to get hdmi and my analog at the same time?

EDIT: Only worked for the first show, most shows (even those I have watched before on this system) have no sound with this setting

[teeedubb]

There is the Dual Audio patch, check out the dev section of the forums. You cant change the volume on passthrough because the sound isnt decoded by xbmc, its just passed on to where you define in your settings. AFAIK to be able to control the volume you need to output in analog, choose analog in the the audio settings menu, but still use the hw:1,3 (or whatever worked for you ) in the custom output setting.

[prae5]

Passthrough audio does exactly was it says - it passes the audio directly through to your amp/tv for decoding. When using passthrough audio, XBMC has no control over the audio stream and it must be done by the end device.

Dual audio support isn't supported yet (i.e using multiple audio outputs), but there is a patch for that.

If you want to use your amp to control your speakers, then use analogue output if it doesn't have any digital inputs and have it down mix.

When making audio changes, I always find it best to restart XBMC as I have found that they don't always apply without a restart.

[snicker]

I'll give it a try. I have never gotten analog to work. Is there a way to tell it to never use passthru? The HW:1,3 worked for HDMI, I would still use that for analog with my above aplay output? How do you restart XBMC in ubuntu without a reboot?

Sorry for the noob.

EDIT: Went to try and noticed that the selection noise was working thru analog. Tried a show and failed to initialise audio device. Rebooted and now no noise thru analog. How do you downmix to analog? All I see is Boost volume level on downmix. At least I now know that the analog device works.

[snicker]

SOLVED!

In case another has the same question, I ended up:
Setting Audio Output to Analog
Speaker Configuration to 2.0
Boost volume level on downmix to on
Audio Output Device Custom
Custome audio device hw:0,0

REBOOT since I dont know how to restart XBMC

Thanks for the tips and direction!