External Sound card silent with internet radio stream
#1
Hi,

I am trying to play the high quality AAC BBC Radio streams through a Hifiberry Digi card driving an Arcam iRDAC. I have also posted this problem to the Hifiberry forum as I cannot determine if this is a Hifiberry specific issue or is general to all external sound cards.

Everything is fine when the signal source is a local file (MP3 or AAC) or UPnP (PC with MediaMonkey and mp3 media) the Digi output sounds great and pi’s HDMI is silent.

When the source is an internet radio stream (AAC or WMA), opened either from the radio add-on or from an address in a local pls file, XBMC sends audio down the pi’s HDMI route (which my TV sends back to the iRDAC where it plays) and there is silence on both the optical and coax outputs of the Digi card.

There must be something subtle about the way audio output switching works. Perhaps this is an issue with all external sound cards, is anyone playing radio with such a configuration?

Has anyone any suggestions please?

Many thanks

Dave
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#2
Which XBMC distribution are you using (OpenELEC, Raspbmc, XBian, Raspbian?) as that could have a very significant bearing on how XBMC behaves.

A debug log (wiki) of when you are playing a stream intended for the Hifiberry might also help - include the whole of the log, and don't upload it here, use either pastebin.com or xbmclogs.com and post the link.
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#3
I think I have now found a workaround for this issue.

This is Rasbmc on a pi model B
Linux raspbmc 3.12.21 #2 PREEMPT Wed Jun 11 04:53:06 UTC 2014 armv6l GNU/Linux

I discovered that the problem is more subtle than I initially thought. The behaviour appears to be coding specific, I can play MP3 encoded streams from but not WMA or AAC. I am not using any add-ons for this, just supplying the stream addresses via playlist files in a music folder.

Looking at the logs I notice that the AAC streams are playing with OMXPlayer. I recalled something on the Hifiberry forum about this and discovered that OMXPlayer does not support the ALSA drivers. The solution is to switch to dvdplayer in userdata/advancedsettings.xml

Code:
<advancedsettings>
    <video>
        <defaultplayer>dvdplayer</defaultplayer>
        <defaultdvdplayer>dvdplayer</defaultdvdplayer>
    </video>
</advancedsettings>

This may have side effects but so far I have not found them.

Thanks for considering my post and making helpful suggestions.

Regards

Dave
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#4
(2014-08-16, 13:53)DPlummer Wrote: Looking at the logs I notice that the AAC streams are playing with OMXPlayer. I recalled something on the Hifiberry forum about this and discovered that OMXPlayer does not support the ALSA drivers. The solution is to switch to dvdplayer in userdata/advancedsettings.xml

My development newclock4 tree handles automatically choosing omxplayer/dvdplayer (with an ALSA audio sink like HifiBerry being one of the triggers to use dvdplayer).
There are OpenELEC test builds here. So far a raspbmc test build with this in hasn't been made.

But in the future official builds should have this feature.
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External Sound card silent with internet radio stream0