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User 29008 · 2008-07-15, 08:27

Hey folks,

can't tell ya how excited I am to see XBMC up and running on my HTPC now. The XBMC Frontend alone on 46" 1080p is something I could watch for hours hehe.
Anyway, I got one more problem to solve which is digital audio. I wanna route all audio, stereo, ac3 etc. via spdif out of my Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H onboard sound, which again is a Realtek ACL882 Chip.
After some more reading I have all Ubuntu Hardy System sounds working via SPDIF out. So basically I am all set up with digital sound in Ubuntu. Only thing is, that I don't get nothing on the sound side in XBMC yet. Only things I tried so far is setting sound from analog to digital in XBMC audio settings. Everything else is still on default, among others, XBMC seems to have the correct audio device for digital out, which was set automatically to IEC958.
I would be glad if someone could point me into the right direction to configure alls sounds in XBMC to be played via SPDIF digital.

thanks a lot

boba

**NEI** · 2008-07-15, 09:21

My digital out works flawlessly in xbmc with the same mainboard. but i must admit i didn't change any settings in ubuntu aside of turning on IEC958 in alsamixer. So maybe your setup in ubuntu broke something for xbmc?

virgink · 2008-07-15, 09:22

Have you tried playing media using any other player like mplayer/xine or vlc?

jmarshall · 2008-07-15, 09:30

It could be PulseAudio causing problems.

User 29008 · 2008-07-15, 09:41

NEI Wrote:My digital out works flawlessly in xbmc with the same mainboard. but i must admit i didn't change any settings in ubuntu aside of turning on IEC958 in alsamixer. So maybe your setup in ubuntu broke something for xbmc?

Well, first I didn't have any digital sound in Ubuntu too. Didn't work out of the box. Then I checked Alsamixer as well, and there I saw IEC958, but I wasn't able to adjust its volume. It was just listed as last entry in the row but without a adjustable volume bar.
Then I installed gnome-alsamixer and there I unmuted everything just to make sure, turned up volume for the different channels, like center, lfe etc. And THEN I had sound within Ubuntu via SPDIF out.
Didn't do anything besides that.

boba

User 29008 · 2008-07-15, 09:42

virgink Wrote:Have you tried playing media using any other player like mplayer/xine or vlc?

Not yet, but I'll give it a try tonight when I am back home.

boba

**NEI** · 2008-07-15, 12:16

boba23 Wrote:Well, first I didn't have any digital sound in Ubuntu too. Didn't work out of the box. Then I checked Alsamixer as well, and there I saw IEC958, but I wasn't able to adjust its volume. It was just listed as last entry in the row but without a adjustable volume bar.
Then I installed gnome-alsamixer and there I unmuted everything just to make sure, turned up volume for the different channels, like center, lfe etc. And THEN I had sound within Ubuntu via SPDIF out.
Didn't do anything besides that.

boba

You cannot adjust volume of spdif out. It's digital, so no mixing is possible. At least at the output. This is normal behaviour. So just turn IEC958 on and set XBMC to use digital out and you will be fine. The settings for front, center, a.s.o should have no influence to spdif!

User 29008 · 2008-07-15, 15:08

NEI Wrote:You cannot adjust volume of spdif out. It's digital, so no mixing is possible. At least at the output. This is normal behaviour. So just turn IEC958 on and set XBMC to use digital out and you will be fine. The settings for front, center, a.s.o should have no influence to spdif!

Good point, but ... how do I turn SPDIF ON in the standard alsamixer, as I said I saw it, could even select it by navigating all the way to the right ... but that's it, how can I "turn it on"? I tried pressing enter, space and so on ... but no changes.
And again, in the gnome alsa-mixer, which I installed afterwards, IEC is not listed. As stated before, I just unmuted everything that was muted, turned up channels which were all the way down .. and THEN I had system sounds working ....

Well, can't check now, since I am not home, so I'll post more results tonight.

boba

feday · 2008-07-15, 15:22

The unmute key in the ncurses (regular) alsa-mixer is "m", perhaps you just need to un-mute it there for it to work?

User 29008 · 2008-07-15, 15:42

feday Wrote:The unmute key in the ncurses (regular) alsa-mixer is "m", perhaps you just need to un-mute it there for it to work?

"m", great :-) I didn't try that of course. Well I am gonna check it out tonight.
Thanks for your help guys ....

boba

Gaarv · 2008-07-15, 15:43

here the post I found my answer when facing the same issue :

http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=188...stcount=11

ShortySco · 2008-07-15, 20:32

Gaarv Wrote:here the post I found my answer when facing the same issue :

http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=188...stcount=11

Yes this is how i got mine working, although i've since found the same thing can be achieved by double clicking the speaker icon in the taskbar and messing with those settings.

Also since then mine has failed for no apparent reason (no system sounds but i get media sound?) i've not yet tried too much to fix it, but this seems promising, and could be relevant to this thread.

Link

Shorty

Halligalli · 2008-07-15, 20:59

ShortySco Wrote:Yes this is how i got mine working, although i've since found the same thing can be achieved by double clicking the speaker icon in the taskbar and messing with those settings.

Also since then mine has failed for no apparent reason (no system sounds but i get media sound?) i've not yet tried too much to fix it, but this seems promising, and could be relevant to this thread.

Link

Shorty

Do you mean sounds as in those produced by XBMC? Because i've had the same issue, and solved that by just removing the .xbmc folder in my home-directory and start over. Odd issue, sometimes navigation sounds just disappeares for no reason.

virgink · 2008-07-15, 21:07

One thing you might want to try is to set both the "Audio Output Device" and "Passthrough Output Device" setting within the "Audio Hardware" Section to your audio device. (iec958) in my case.
I had my "Audio Output Device" set to "default" initially and one day system and stereo sound within XBMC suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason. Changing it to iec958 after some tiresome troubleshooting solved it for me.
Good Luck.

User 29008 · 2008-07-15, 22:43

Thanks so much folks, got it to work :-) I guess in the end it was still the mute thingy in alsamixer, though I wonder why my system sounds did work before? .... anyway, I don't really care as long as XBMC got sound now. AC3 + Stereo PCM works fine, no problems so far.
One thing I noticed is that I dont get the usual XBMC internal clicking sounds when navigating through the frontend ... is that normal or should I have sound there too?

boba