2013-01-04, 21:51
Hi Guys,
I have some trouble connecting my DAC to XBMC.
I have been googling this issue for 2 weeks now and I am not able to find the sollution... So I hope someone here can help me fix it
I think it has something to do with the decoding because I have sound, but the quality is very bad. There is a lot of clipping and sometimes the sound just stops for a few seconds.
I am running an xbmc session on an ubuntu 12.04 and i use LXDE for troubleshooting (unity was too heavy). The DAC is connected through USB.
1. When I hook up my other laptop to the DAC and play some movies, I have no problems
2. When open an lxde session and play the same MKV movie in VLC I have very good sound quality.
3.When I play the movie in xbmc with the internal laptop speakers selected in the sound settings, the sound is quite good (if you ignore of the bad quality of the speakers)
=> this lead me to believe that:
a. The sound is not sent to the DAC correctly
b. XBMC does some CPU intensive decoding when sending files to the DAC and can't keep up
c. Something else...
To select the DAC in xbmc, I tried amost every setting.
Optical/coax and Analog seems to work best
As output device and passthrough I selected:
(since the others wouldn't work)
After reading some topics about xbmc sound I tried setting it to custom and entering
or
Plughw seems to work a little better (less dropouts), but the quality is still very bad
It's interesting to note that the system sounds (the clicking sound when browsing xbmc) are coming from the internal laptop speakers no matter what. This is not a problem for me, just something i noticed.
Can point me in the right direction or walk me through fixing this? I am quite dissapointed that I have a rather expensive dac lying around whie listening to audiotracks on my internal speakers
Here are some more details about the system
aplay -l
Specs:
The system is a (very) old acer aspire 1640 laptop
I upgraded the ram recently from 256, but saw no real advantage. I suspect the CPU is the bottleneck.
Thanks!
Tim
I have some trouble connecting my DAC to XBMC.
I have been googling this issue for 2 weeks now and I am not able to find the sollution... So I hope someone here can help me fix it
I think it has something to do with the decoding because I have sound, but the quality is very bad. There is a lot of clipping and sometimes the sound just stops for a few seconds.
I am running an xbmc session on an ubuntu 12.04 and i use LXDE for troubleshooting (unity was too heavy). The DAC is connected through USB.
1. When I hook up my other laptop to the DAC and play some movies, I have no problems
2. When open an lxde session and play the same MKV movie in VLC I have very good sound quality.
3.When I play the movie in xbmc with the internal laptop speakers selected in the sound settings, the sound is quite good (if you ignore of the bad quality of the speakers)
=> this lead me to believe that:
a. The sound is not sent to the DAC correctly
b. XBMC does some CPU intensive decoding when sending files to the DAC and can't keep up
c. Something else...
To select the DAC in xbmc, I tried amost every setting.
Optical/coax and Analog seems to work best
As output device and passthrough I selected:
Code:
USB Audio CODEC - ie958 - 0 (ALSA)
(since the others wouldn't work)
After reading some topics about xbmc sound I tried setting it to custom and entering
Code:
hw:1,0
Code:
plughw:1,0
Plughw seems to work a little better (less dropouts), but the quality is still very bad
It's interesting to note that the system sounds (the clicking sound when browsing xbmc) are coming from the internal laptop speakers no matter what. This is not a problem for me, just something i noticed.
Can point me in the right direction or walk me through fixing this? I am quite dissapointed that I have a rather expensive dac lying around whie listening to audiotracks on my internal speakers
Here are some more details about the system
aplay -l
Code:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC260 Analog [ALC260 Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: CODEC [USB Audio CODEC], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Specs:
Code:
The DAC: Beresford TC-7520SE Caiman
The system is a (very) old acer aspire 1640 laptop
Code:
Processor: Intel Pentium M 1,73GHz
2MB L2 cache
Core Logic Chipset Intel 915GM
System Bus Speed 533 MHz
RAM: 1GB
Thanks!
Tim