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Linux PulseAudio Sink
#16
(2014-01-16, 10:57)evanpurkhiser Wrote: Just built the latest version from git. It's working great. I did notice that no other sink-inputs can be active when playing back a video with AC3 or DTS audio or the passthrough simply won't happen, I suspect this might be a limitation of PulseAudio?

On a side note, I did also notice that vdpau appears to be broken for me in my build. But I can just leave that disabled for now, PulseAudio support is well worth it (plus multi-threaded ffmpeg works great!) =)


Passthrough is passthrough. That's the name of it :-) No chance to mix that stuff, it means exclusive usage of the output device. Audio is not touched at all, it is just "put as is" on the AVR. If you want mixing, disable passthrough and get it decoded before.

Btw. just as information for me (not related to your question), what hardware do you have and which OS?
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#17
(2014-01-16, 17:23)fritsch Wrote: Passthrough is passthrough. That's the name of it :-) No chance to mix that stuff, it means exclusive usage of the output device. Audio is not touched at all, it is just "put as is" on the AVR. If you want mixing, disable passthrough and get it decoded before.

Btw. just as information for me (not related to your question), what hardware do you have and which OS?

Right, I understand that. I had just hoped that PulseAudio would be smart enough that when an application requested passthrough audio it would kill all of the other sink-inputs, instead it looks like it fails with the error "Waited for stream but it failed". For example, I use MPD on my HTPC. If I just pause the music instead of stopping it, MPD leaves it's input-sink alive and passthrough fails.

I am using a AMD A6-3500 APU using the 1:7.2 xf86-video-ati OSS drivers (mesa 10.0.2) on Arch Linux 3.12.7-2-ARCH

(2014-01-16, 11:57)wsnipex Wrote: debug log?

Here is a debug log for when VDPAU seems to fail, looks like the pertinent error is "VAAPI - unable to initialize display -1 - unknown libva error". (Sorry, I don't want to derail the topic!)
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#18
@evanpurkhiser: passthrough will only work if no other device plays audio. If you want to get it mixed, disable AC3, DTS and configure with pavucontrol to have e.g. 5.1 or something, if you are on hdmi.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#19
@fritsch: Yep, I totally get that, I'm not looking to mix other audio during playback =) It can just be a little confusing when I get no passthrough because another program kept a sink-input alive even though it wasn't really using it (In the case of MPD being paused, I can understand why it would want to keep the sink-input active though). I may take a look around and see if it's possible to get PulseAudio to kill input-sinks when passthrough is requested.
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#20
Besides that passthrough is working for you? and you see the DTS / Dolby Sign on the AVR?
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#21
Yep, it's working great!
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#22
Any special things, one needs to do to get it configured? Though I programmed it - I could not get it to work :-)
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#23
(2014-01-17, 00:12)evanpurkhiser Wrote: @fritsch: Yep, I totally get that, I'm not looking to mix other audio during playback =) It can just be a little confusing when I get no passthrough because another program kept a sink-input alive even though it wasn't really using it (In the case of MPD being paused, I can understand why it would want to keep the sink-input active though). I may take a look around and see if it's possible to get PulseAudio to kill input-sinks when passthrough is requested.

Or mpd to suspend it's attachment to pulseaudio...
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#24
@fritsch: Other than just enabling the AC3 and DTS formats with `pactl set-sink-formats 0 "pcm;ac3-iec61937;dts-iec61937a"`, enabling passthrough in the XBMC options, and making sure no other applications were using PA (`pacmd list-sink-inputs`), it just worked!
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#25
Yeah - exactly, that's how it was planned :-) I got it working with OpenELEC quite easily, but did not have the chance to test it via development. I was a bit astonished when an Ubuntu user told, that it does only do noise ... http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1602456 <- It seems to be an Ubuntu Bug. Arch is fine.

Thanks for reporting back.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#26
Ubuntu is the orphan always something... I really think the Ubuntu releases are better LTS > LTS anything else is I found to less reliable.
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#27
Can you get me a pacmd list-sink-inputs when you are actually playing such an ac3 file?
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#28
@fritsch: Not sure if you were asking me or not, but here's the output of list-sink-inputs when playing a ac3 video.

Also, I've run into a slightly more frustrating case than with mpd not removing it's sink-input when paused. I've setup a tunnel-sink from my desktop to my HTPC so I can play audio from my desktop on some nicer speakers. Unfortunately it looks like this keeps a sink-input open at all times Sad I have to make sure to manually kill it before siting down to watch a ac3/dts movie.

To me, it seems like it would be nice if when PA receives a request for passthrough to a device, it would move all sink-inputs connected to that sink to the null sink, and then back when passthrough is finished. I don't think this would be XBMC's responsibility. Though perhaps it would be possible to write a addon that detects when a video wants to play using passthrough and does all of the sink swapping?
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#29
He is asking you to type on a terminal

Code:
pacmd list-sink-inputs

And pastebin the results and post link.
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#30
I did Smile
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