• 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4(current)
  • 5
  • 6
  • 8
HDMI AUDIO a Success finally
#46
Hi all.
Wasnt sure whether to put this in the main HDMI audio page - so played safe in here!

The Situation:
Want a nice media center - running XBMC. Ive run XBMC on xbox'es for years, and love its simplicity and stability. Have tried the windows alternative, but its just not as good.

The Hardware:
Shuttle SN68G2 with a quieter fan and PSU
Nvidia 9400GT with HDMI Out
Some ram and CPU!
500gb Harddrive.

The Progress:
Installed XBMC LIve 8.10 last night onto the HDD - perfect, runs though the HDMI - looks lovely.
Remote (MCE) works out of the box
ITs quick and stable

The Issue

NO SOUND!
Well not quite true, sound works fine out of the analog stuff, and the motherboard has no SPDIF onboard. Obvious choice here is to use HDMI Audio - but alas - I couldnt get it to work.I followed the tutorial through, but alas no joy:
- when installling the NVIDIA driver upgraded it error-ed. IS this meant to happen (presuming not). Said somthing about couldnt find a kernal match.
- Alsamixer, had no menchon of HDMI anywhere
- tried to alsa script with the -i three times.

The solution?
What is the best option?
Shall i plug away at the HDMI audio? Im not a skilled linux user tho.
- any advice over what could be causing it not to happen?

Do i buy a SPDIF sound card (like this one -is it going to work?)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/7-1-Surround-Sou...B0017QG0N2
Reply
#47
BLKMGK Wrote:180.11xx NVIDIA drivers are still sort of beta yes? Will this work as well with 177.xx drivers? I am trying to get this working on a different ASUS board and was trying to stay away from the new accelerated drivers until they were more fully baked so am curious Smile

BLKMGK,

I found this one yesterday, with respect to hd (.mkv) playback where I was having issues I though with the rip itself, Thanks to harry and this little tidbit, I am now watching those same rips with less than 60% cpu usage and less than 20 dropped frames from like 200 before.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?p=2...post260052


Dave
Reply
#48
matyhaty Wrote:The Issue
NO SOUND!
Well not quite true, sound works fine out of the analog stuff, and the motherboard has no SPDIF onboard. Obvious choice here is to use HDMI Audio - but alas - I couldnt get it to work.I followed the tutorial through, but alas no joy:
- when installling the NVIDIA driver upgraded it error-ed. IS this meant to happen (presuming not). Said somthing about couldnt find a kernal match.
- Alsamixer, had no menchon of HDMI anywhere
- tried to alsa script with the -i three times.

Hey!

Sorry you are having troubles. Is your nividia on-board or a separate card. This tut was wirtten for an on-board nvidia gpu and chipset. Not sure if your shuttle has that or not. if you are getting kernel header match errors, then you missed the sudo apt-get update and or the build-essential (headers install) from the tut.

The driver install will create those for you IF they find the match already installed in your case they did not.

your mainboard will likely have an spdif pinout on it and the same pinout input on the video card which would take a cable like an OLD CD rom style pc audio cable or very similar, to pass the digital to the hdmi output on the video card and then your bios would likely need to be set to route the hdmi audio this way.

anyhow, if you want to stick with it then I would suggest a clean re-install and start from the top of the tut line by line slowly. making sure as you proceed that each step installs without error.

I tried to look in the manual for your shuttle, I could not get any layouts of the m/b in it, but in specs it lists a spdif in and out. Also if you are running an nvidia pci-e card make sure and set your init first VGA to pci-e/x setting and up the frame buffers to at least 256 from 128.

rgds,

Dave
Reply
#49
rodercot

The graphics is PCI-E serpate card.
The shuttles does have geforce 7 on board, however no DVi or HDMI - so useless for my needs.

Ill look for the SPDIF out tho, i did see shuttle do a PC-17 part, which is a header bit for it, but if it can go straight to graphics card -even better.

I definatly did all lines of the tutorial, but no harm in re-doing thats for sure

Any other tips?
Is it worth me taking a picture of any errors and posting here?

Many many thanks
Reply
#50
matyhaty Wrote:rodercot

The graphics is PCI-E serpate card.
The shuttles does have geforce 7 on board, however no DVi or HDMI - so useless for my needs.

Ill look for the SPDIF out tho, i did see shuttle do a PC-17 part, which is a header bit for it, but if it can go straight to graphics card -even better.

I definatly did all lines of the tutorial, but no harm in re-doing thats for sure

Any other tips?
Is it worth me taking a picture of any errors and posting here?

Many many thanks

The thing I cannot get straight in my head is this, you do not have an onboard hdmi connector, hence you are not going to get the HDMI audio device in the alsamixer I would assume.

If the current NVIDIA driver did not install then your HDMI port on the NVIDIA is not likely active, you need to get the driver working sans errors.

I would link up the spdif out from the board and look for the spdif in on the card there must be one, there seems to be one on all the hdmi pci-e cards and then in alsamixer you will need to for sure unmute any iec958 devices you find to enable that on-board spdif output.

Then by changing the settings in xbmc to force hdmi I would think it would work for you.

you may need to create the asoundrc files as it seems some have had to do if you read through this post.

but first step I would start from scratch clean and setup the bios as a first step.

Dave
Reply
#51
ok, so this is where im at....

the motherboard has a 6 pin sdpif out
after a 60mb download of a layout, connected pin 6 and 4, to the graphics card, using the lead provided with the card.

6 being the spdif out pin
4 being a ground pin

gave it a quick try from the cd - no joy

- so time for a clean hdd install.
reformatted the disc, (option 0 - followed it through)

once installed, checked the bios, for the HD option. The options are auto or disabled, so left on auto.

so, ran XBMC, from the HDD, system - settings - audio hardware, - digital - no sound - boo hoo

so what now:
i did some research:

aplay -l says:
card0: hda nvidia alc883 analog
card1: "" "" "" digital

i went in alsamixer and unmuted the digital iec thing.

any ideas?
the other issue is to actually test that the spdif is working at all - im presuming in my not so logical mind, you dont need to say hdmi audio, as the graphics card is getting the feed from the on onboard sound card, or do i still need to do the tutorial steps from start to end?

thanks
Reply
#52
Wink 
I wanted to report that I have had success with rodercot's guide on a Asus P5N7A-VM with an E8400/2GB RAM running XBMC Live 8.10, NOT ubuntu 8.10, installed to a 4GB Patriot Xporter USB Thumb drive. I followed the guide exactly (well except that I did everything but install the new NVIDIA drivers through ssh'ing in from my Mac. I found that was much easier since I could essentially copy&paste command lines from the guide).
Again, I followed the guide to install the newer NVIDIA drivers then alsa 1.0.18a. Once that was done I had to unmute the iec958 devices in 'alsamixer' then change the default and passthrough both to 'hdmi' in XBMC audio settings. I didn't have to reconfigure my asoundrc files.
So far I have full audio playback for all movies and music. I haven't had time to extensively test so I haven't experienced any hiccups that Rodercot mentioned. I look forward to testing out if I can play Dolby TrueHD files and the like as soon as I can.
Big GrinRodercotBig Grin, three cheers for you for figuring this out and taking the time to write up the guide!

Merry Christmas Everybody,
Will

(Sorry, MatyHaty I wish I had some help for you)
Reply
#53
Glad you had success with it, just a note on TrueHD, I ripped a BD the other day with the TrueHD, I left it as truehd to try it and it cannot pass it, It would play the movie although very badly and the sound would come and go, looking at the info while watching the movie it was jumping all over the place from 5.1 to 2 to 4 etc channel. I ended up remuxing the moved with the trueHD downconverted to normal AC3.

Dave
Reply
#54
rodercot Wrote:Glad you had success with it, just a note on TrueHD, I ripped a BD the other day with the TrueHD, I left it as truehd to try it and it cannot pass it, It would play the movie although very badly and the sound would come and go, looking at the info while watching the movie it was jumping all over the place from 5.1 to 2 to 4 etc channel. I ended up remuxing the moved with the trueHD downconverted to normal AC3.

Dave

why re-encode to AC3? why not FLAC and let XBMC pass to your receiver as 6-ch LPCM?
Reply
#55
Rodercot,
Would you mind checking to see if a multi-channel FLAC works?

I went poking around and I discovered that FFmpeg supports the decoding of Dolby TrueHD but the FFmpeg libraries that XBMC uses have not been updated yet to reflect this ability.
"Also, FFmpeg now has floating point PCM support and supports MLP/TrueHD decoding" - http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/

(I wonder how hard it would be to update it on our own for fun?) It is likely that DTS-HD works already because XBMC is just reading the CORE track that is contained in a DTS-HD track. (The CORE track is the same as a regular DTS track.)
elupus Wrote:dts hd is partly supported in xbmc on linux/windows atleast. it will decode/passthrough as if it was standard dts.

ac3 hd aka truehd will be mostly supported when we update our ffmpeg libs. (won't be before we release).
-Will
Reply
#56
Bahndit Wrote:Rodercot,
Would you mind checking to see if a multi-channel FLAC works?

I went poking around and I discovered that FFmpeg supports the decoding of Dolby TrueHD but the FFmpeg libraries that XBMC uses have not been updated yet to reflect this ability.
"Also, FFmpeg now has floating point PCM support and supports MLP/TrueHD decoding" - http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/

(I wonder how hard it would be to update it on our own for fun?) It is likely that DTS-HD works already because XBMC is just reading the CORE track that is contained in a DTS-HD track. (The CORE track is the same as a regular DTS track.)

-Will

I do not have a m/c flac file. Only two channel. If someone would post something somewhere I will grab it and try it out.

process for converting to m/c flac I am not sure. Do you need to convert all 6 channels to .wav first. I have not tried this.

Dave
Reply
#57
you might want to check out eac3to, it let's you convert various audio formats, DTS-MA or TrueHD into 6ch Flac in one step.
Reply
#58
Freddo Wrote:you might want to check out eac3to, it let's you convert various audio formats, DTS-MA or TrueHD into 6ch Flac in one step.

Using tsmuxer then eac Ya! I guess I do not have all the codecs installed, I just tried to demux the lpcm from a bd it came up as two wave files, my options under demux are greyed out.

Anyhow, this is probably not the forum to be discussing this stuff...

rgds,

Dave
Reply
#59
rodercot Wrote:Using tsmuxer then eac Ya! I guess I do not have all the codecs installed, I just tried to demux the lpcm from a bd it came up as two wave files, my options under demux are greyed out.

Anyhow, this is probably not the forum to be discussing this stuff...

rgds,

Dave

sent you a PM about this
Reply
#60
Hi all,

My success story:

MB: M3N78-EM
Graphics: Integrated NVIDIA GeForce 8300
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e (2 x 2.6GHz, 45W!!!)
RAM: 4GB

XBMC Live 8.10 installed on the HD

I was strictly followed rodercot's "manual".
I have to small problems only during the install:

1)
Code:
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

for me worked:
Code:
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

2)
in the alsamixer I did not see the iec958 devices. The problem was my monitor is too narrow and all iec958 devices were out of the screen. It took me 3 fresh new re-installation of the XBMC before I figured it out.
The moral: if you do not see your iec958 devices, try to use ritht arrow on the keyboard and go as fare right as you can.
you can mute and unmute devices by pressing "m" key repeatedly


After a successful installation it was necessary to follow Snowflake's advice and create the file /home/xbmc/.asoundrc:

wiht the code in it:

Code:
pcm.dmixer {
   type dmix
   ipc_key 1024
   ipc_key_add_uid false
   ipc_perm 0660
   slave {
      pcm "hw:0,3"
      rate 48000
      channels 2
      format S32_LE
      period_time 0
      period_size 1024
      buffer_time 0
      buffer_size 4096
   }
}

pcm.!default {
   type plug
   slave.pcm "dmixer"
}



After that the easiest part, settings in the XBMC:
Audio settings:
digital
off
off
default
default

I hope this can help to some others as it helped to me.


to snowflake:
I have Logitech DiNovo keyboard as well and I am heading the same problems.
mabybe following (acording to: http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/grosse...st-1670396) can help:

in the file: /etc/default/bluetooth

change HID2HCI_ENABLED=1 to HID2HCI_ENABLED=0

I did not try it yet, but it looks from the comments in the file, it can solve our problem.

thanks a lot, Rodercot

Petr
Reply
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4(current)
  • 5
  • 6
  • 8

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
HDMI AUDIO a Success finally4