[swensonator]

So I use my home desktop as both an HTPC with XBMC on one monitor (plasma tv in living room), as well as the family PC in the home office with a 2nd monitor. I have RCA S/PDIF running to a receiver in the living room, and 2.0 speakers connected to the computer in the office. With XBMC Frodo, I could specify the use of S/PDIF on XBMC and still use the 2.0 speakers connected to the computer simultaneously. The new audio options in Gotham seem to force me into picking a single output device, or at least they only show the default audio device as an option. Is my multi-audio-device setup no longer viable with Gotham? Do I need to revert back to using ALSA in order to accomplish what I want?

Additionally, even if I set S/PDIF as the primary audio device (rendering my 2.0 speakers useless, but allowing me to select S/PDIF in XBMC), I don't get proper passthrough, even after following the instructions in the wiki. In pavucontrol I set S/PDIF as the output device, clicked the boxes for AC3 and DTS, enabled passthrough in XBMC, and turned on AC3 and DTS capable receiver. However, my DTS source is still being remixed to Dolby Pro. Any suggestions for this one?

Thanks for any help.

[fritsch]

Please read the announcement: http://xbmc.org/xbmc-13-0-gotham-rises/ (search for behaviour change)
And after that, the wiki entry: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=PulseAudio

And as always: Debug Log or it never happened.

[fritsch]

After rereading what you have written. I suspect ouy have a hacked "asoundrc" in place, that doubles the output from analog to spdif and this one you chose as your "primary output". As you have a full blown pulseaudio setup running, xbmc picks up your pulse devices now and makes them usable.

You can easily do spdif / analog out by using the combined sink, that the howto describes.

Concerning your spdif for passthrough output: This is always exclusive. E.g. you cannot listen to other things over spdif, when it's in passthrough mode. spdifs are (by design) two channel only, but can output DTS and AC3 via the AVR.

If you want your old ALSA config back, do the workaround the wiki page suggests, though I cannot recommend that at all.

Edit: And btw. as pulseaudio supports multiple devices and streams in parallel. Spotify (when configured correctly), e.g. to use the pulse analog output should just coexist as it does not touch the spdif device, which is in passthrough mode at all. For the normal output device, you can choose "combined" output. So normal mp3s would play over spdif and analog and whatever. When you playback passthrough, spdif is used and other desktop programs (you have xbmc windowed in the background?) can use spotify with the analog out.

[swensonator]

I understand that passthrough is exclusive, and I'm not trying to use it for multiple things at once. I want to be able to use passthrough for XBMC, while simultaneously using analog stereo for something different (e.g. Spotify) while sitting at the computer.

I do remember this being a royal pain to get working the way I wanted, but that was several years ago and I don't remember all the details. I likely do have a hacked asoundrc file. Why do you not recommend the ALSA workaround? Is it because xbmc now correctly implements and expects to use pulseaudio? Would I be better off downgrading to Frodo rather than trying to implement ALSA in gotham?

[fritsch]

Why I don't recommend the asound workaround: xbmc has no influence on it, this might cause stutter, wrong initialization, drop outs and so on, even initialization might fail. If xbmc picks up Pulseaudio on your system then it's even worse than I thought :-)

passthrough on xbmc (which highly interfers with the PA server)
spotify which most likely uses another alsa device

When you now receive an email or open a youtube video by chance - the other two will get broken beyond repair. I also wonder how PA can coexist on that hacked together system.

Start xbmc with: AE_SINK=ALSA xbmc and everything should be the same as you had it in Frodo.

[swensonator]

Adding AE_SINK=ALSA works like a charm (in the sense that it allows me to independently select S/PDIF on xbmc and while having the default device on the computer be Analog Stereo). However it works, it hasn't been a problem. I can watch a movie in the living room, passing DTS to the receiver at the same time my wife watches youtube, sends and receives email and does whatever else she wants. I guess I stumbled upon a stable configuration somehow.

So, while this setup works, it is obvious from your comments that it isn't ideal. If I were to remove ALSA from my computer and just use the PA install, would it be possible to achieve the same results or have I created a setup that isn't *supposed* to work and I'm just lucky that it does?

[froman]

So I use my home desktop as both an HTPC with XBMC on one monitor (plasma tv in living room), as well as the family PC in the home office with a 2nd monitor. I have RCA S/PDIF running to a receiver in the living room, and 2.0 speakers connected to the computer in the office. With XBMC Frodo, I could specify the use of S/PDIF on XBMC and still use the 2.0 speakers connected to the computer simultaneously. The new audio options in Gotham seem to force me into picking a single output device, or at least they only show the default audio device as an option. Is my multi-audio-device setup no longer viable with Gotham? Do I need to revert back to using ALSA in order to accomplish what I want?

Additionally, even if I set S/PDIF as the primary audio device (rendering my 2.0 speakers useless, but allowing me to select S/PDIF in XBMC), I don't get proper passthrough, even after following the instructions in the wiki. In pavucontrol I set S/PDIF as the output device, clicked the boxes for AC3 and DTS, enabled passthrough in XBMC, and turned on AC3 and DTS capable receiver. However, my DTS source is still being remixed to Dolby Pro. Any suggestions for this one?

Thanks for any help.

pulseaudio sucks, especially with passthrough, go back to alsa.

[fritsch]

@froman:
Yeah, no idea at all but only time for one sentence.

Pulseaudio can do EAC3, AC3 and DTS without any issues. DTS-HD / TrueHD can be transcoded to AC3 - at the price of loosing quality (that you won't hear on standard speakers).

@swensator:
I wonder why ou have pulseaudio at all on your computer, as you seem to plain use ALSA?. Basicaly, if your given setup works for you, no need to change anything, but still I wonder. I think your luck for now was, that you use SPDIF only for xbmc. So you just set the default device in pulseaudio to the analog sound card - pulse stopped accessing the other card - so it was "free" for xbmc use. That use case should also work with pulseaudio only. Setup the spdif to be 2 channels and enable AC3, DTS for it - this should make it selectable as the passthrough device in xbmc. Your wife still should be able to use youtube as she did before.

I can tell you if the configuration is fine, by looking at:
pactl list sinks
pactl list sink-inputs (when playing a DTS or AC3 stream)
pactl list sink-inputs (when playing DTS over spdif and doing normal audio via the analog sound card)
Also the device enumeration would be interesting to see in your xbmc.log

@the rest reading this:
Many people think that pulseaudio sucks, but all have it installed and are running their desktop with it. In fact pulseaudio is quite easily to program - there server cares for a lot of features, while sacrificing others (audiophiles won't like it, but hey - why did they install it?). xbmc only picks up what user has installed, it's a runtime detection - cause we thought: when user installs an audio server, he wants to use it ...

[froman]

@froman:
Yeah, no idea at all but only time for one sentence.

sorry I am a real fan of stability, that's why I don't use ubuntu, or pulse.

by the way, pulse and optical output passthrough works really badly

[fritsch]

Then no idea, what you are doing in that thread.