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[LINUX] HOW-TO get multi-channel HD sound output working over NVIDIA HDMI
#1
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PART 1 SETTING UP ALSA

INTRODUCTION

Note: The part of guide with native alsa setup is mostly for dedicated htpc users who don't use Ubuntu as an everyday desktop (like XbmcBuntu or minimal setup).
With the Pulseaudio setup guide which i add later will be suitable for ubuntu normal desktop setup.

Requirements:
- You need to have Nvidia hdmi audio integrated codec on your motherboard. Like the IONs or 9300 9400 integrated motherboard chipsets.
- You need Ubuntu Jaunty (or Karmic)
- You need the Nvidia drivers 185 series. IMPORTANT: the 190 series driver breaks lpcm hdmi output totally or partially
- At last both not least, you must have a HDMI 1.1 compatibe HDMI AV receiver (Like Onkyo TX-SR605 what i have) connected with hdmi cable
- I will try to update this guide to work with the newest Nvidia graphic cards G210, GT220
- UPDATE 19.10.2009 I got somewhere supporting these cards, just check my Post #30

Update 21.10.2009
Xbmc developers are currently working on a brand new sound rendering system called "master audio". Tha branch has not been updated for a while but it will be continued and might reach mainline in the far future. That could be a solution which utilize the good things in Alsa and also Pulseaudio. That will change the game for sure, but until than this is what we have.


Why HDMI audio over the good old well working SPDIF.

SPDIF connection, either optical or coaxial is bandwidth limited. This means you can only achieve 2 channel UNCOMPRESSED lpcm audio up to (96khz, 24bits in the best case) or with AC3 or DTS LOSSY codecs you can have 5.1 multichannel audio with 48khz, 16bits. So at the best case you can only have Lossy multichannel and only in limited bitrates.

HDMI connection can handle 7.1 multichannel UNCOMPRESSED audio up to 192khhz, 24bits or can bitstream DTS-HD, DOLBY TRUEHD LOSSLESS formats to your AV receiver, if it supports those formats.

There is a great detailed explanation about formats here:
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/1064

So why do i need HDMI over SPDIF now ?

It is true that the available HD multichannel material is limited yet. Mostly to Blu-ray movies and HD DVD-Audio or SACD music.

But there are also the codecs which can not be bitstreamed over SPDIF nor HDMI. These are Apple's multichannel AAC used by .MOV formats, or multichannel HD or SD FLAC music or video sound, WMA HD or SD multichannel material etc. The only way you can enjoy these formats is to decode them to uncompressed LPCM and send them over HDMI.

So there are already a lot of reasons why you want HDMI over SPDIF. And i haven't spoken about the fact that this way you only need one cable for all your 8 channel audio and the FULL HD quality Video signal. If you already using hdmi connection with your audio than this is a must for you as current alsa drivers only support 48khz/16bits with horrible quality CD playback.

What this guide can provide:
- 7.1 multichannel LPCM connection up to 192khz/24bits on nvidia hardware.
- DTS, AC3 bitstreaming over HDMI
- working navigation sounds
- playback of sound on it's original bitrate UNTOUCHED without any upmixing/downmixing to achieve the best possible quality with native ALSA configuration or
- high quality mixing with operation-system sounds on HD bitrates up to 192khz/24bits with pulseaudio configuration (Maybe i add this part a little later)

Just a note that if you use pulseaudio or even with alsa dmix module or default alsa device, your sound is always up/downsampled to a certain bitrate. This could cause serious quality drops even if alsa converts the sound to the same bitrate.

Here are some test results where you can see that only a decent sample rate converter can get close to the original sound. Those SRC-s use a lot of CPU time. The best is to have the native sound untouched, unmixed, unmodified.

Image Image Image

You can view further results with a whole bunch of sampler types here:
http://src.infinitewave.ca/

What's not working and what are some side effects.
- DTS-HS, DOLBY-TRUEHD bitstreaming is not working due to hardware and software limitations.
- We will have to update alsa and compile a custom kernel module (this will change in the future as the patches will be applied in the newer kernels, but only at the best case in Ubuntu 10.04) what means that every time you let ubuntu update your working kernel, you will need to make a little additional work to get things up and working again, or you just don't let ubuntu update the kernel.
- In any case you can easily revert the modifications to get back your original setup.

I was in contact with an Nvidia developer We Ni and a great Alsa developer Takashi Iwai to help them testing things out. I should thank them all this great stuff, letting the drivers be ready for HD audio. All credits go to them.

The patched file what we will use (patch_nvhdmi.c) finally went into the kernel tree in the past days so with the next Alsa release and possibly next kernel releases will already include the most important parts.

http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-kern...4b;hb=HEAD

LET'S DO IT:

We will use the famous Ubuntu Alsa upgrade script which i modified to patch the source to enable all bitrates and channel configurations.

Ths script updates your system to the latest packages. To make things safer i suggest doing this step before running the script to see if everything went ok.

Note that updating your system could install a new kernel over your existing one. In this case your custom kernel modules have to be recompiled. For example if your nvidia driver was not installed from ppa, you will have to recompile the nvidia kernel module with the driver installer, or the better use nvidia ppa for installing the dkms auto update module and you wont'have any problems with updates anymore.
https://launchpad.net/~nvidia-vdpau/+archive/ppa


So let's update
Code:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo reboot

Ater reboot and everything back to normal let's get a needed package which we use (dos2unix) so that we will be able to use bash scripts downloaded from pastebin.com

Code:
sudo apt-get install tofrodos

We will add the current user to the audio group. That is sometimes needed.
Code:
sudo adduser `who | awk '{print $1}'` audio

Let's get my modified Alsa upgrade script, make it executable, clean from carriage returns:
Code:
cd ~
wget http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?dl=f29c37574 -O Alsa_upgrade-1.0.21_hd.sh
sudo chmod a+x Alsa_upgrade-1.0.21_hd.sh
dos2unix Alsa_upgrade-1.0.21_hd.sh

I have put two more run options to the script
-p patches the downloaded source
-dpi downloads, applies patch, compiles, installs everything in one step

Now we are going to do everything in one step, but alternatively you can run the sript with -d than -p than -i options to make it in 3 steps.

Code:
sudo ./Alsa_upgrade-1.0.21_hd.sh -dpi

Press "1" when prompted !
Take a break now as this can last for 10-15 minutes. You can follow the process as it is described by the script's text output.
We can clean the unnecessary files now, except from the alsa-driver source. We will need that later if we want to make a kernel upgrade. After it is finished just reboot:
Code:
cd /usr/src/Alsa*
sudo rm -rf alsa-l* alsa-p* alsa-u* alsa-f* alsa-t* alsa-o*
sudo reboot

Now it is time for you to decide if you go the native ALSA way or you go in the PULSEAUDIO way.

ALSA pros:
- Native untouched crystal clear sound whatever format the sound has it goes directly to receiver
- no time delay in playback
ALSA cons:
- No software mixing: this is bad if you use Ubntu as a desktop with other apps running, or if you want xbmc music played with crossfade support

PULSEAUDIO pros:
- Software mixing possible with other apps, system sounds
- xbmc crossfade support
- The sounds are played all in a certain bitrate no matter what soundformat you play. This means you don't hear "clicks" from your receiver changing formats all the time.
PULSEAUDIO cons:
- The sounds are played all in a certain bitrate no matter what soundformat you play, this means it alway down/upmixes sounds which depending on the resampler we use, could result a bit of quality drop.
- There is a slight delay in navigation sounds
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#2
PART 2: SETTING UP THE SYSTEM THE ALSA WAY

Note once again that you loose software mixing if you choose this way.
When coming back from reboot, we create a custom virtual alsa device because in nvidia driver, speaker channels are wrongly set up, so we need to change the speaker channel configuration. For this i created a "remap-surround71" virtual device in this file:
Code:
sudo wget http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?dl=f5f9654bb -O /etc/asound.conf
sudo dos2unix /etc/asound.conf

To tell the system to actually use this as a default digital output leaving the predefined hdmi device alsa definition. I created a custom HDA-Intel conf file for alsa. With this file we achieve that all ubuntu playback applications (including xbmc-tested, vlc-tested) will use default,hdmi,surround51,surround50 etc. vitrual devices as remapped channel configurations directed to your hdmi output without mixing.

Code:
sudo cp /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf_backup
sudo wget http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?dl=f2e38265 -O /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf
sudo dos2unix /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf

We will unmute the needed channels and store these settings:
Code:
/usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'Master',0 unmute && /usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'Master',0 100
/usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'IEC958 Default PCM',0 unmute
/usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'IEC958',0 unmute && /usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'IEC958',1 unmute
sudo alsactl store

Now we can test if everything went ok. First let's check out the Alsa Driver version and the available playback devices:

Code:
cat /proc/asound/version
aplay -l
alsamixer
The alsa driver version should be 1.0.21
aplay -l should show a HDMI device on card 0 device 3
alsamixer should show three iec devices, all has to be unmuted.

For gnome-desktop users who want to have this feature, knowing that they loose software mixing of system sounds set up sound configuration like this:

Image Image

We'd better have a reboot now and after we can start testing sound. For speaker test to work it is needed to have the xserver started. So you need to type these commands into an xterminal (or gnome terminal) or you need to start the xserver (maybe with xbmc) and ssh over another machine to run these commands. First er test a basic 2 channel 48/16 configuration, than we jump to the most advanced 192/32 6 channel configuration. (You can stop testing with crtl+c)

Code:
speaker-test -Dhdmi -c2 -r48000 -FS16_LE
speaker-test -Dhdmi -c6 -r192000 -FS32_LE

With these command you can easily test your speak configuration if all channels sound in the right speaker.

XBMC SETUP ALSA WAY

If everything is ok now we just have to set up xbmc to use our tuned hdmi device. It will be very easy with one little trick. On sound settings just set it like this (note that looks like in the latest SVN and probably will be in 9.10)
Image
Note that in older xbmc revisions just type "hdmi" for both devices.

As we lost software mixing capabilities (just like we wanted) we need to disable crossfading in xbmc's music settings like this:
Image

There is one trick which has to be done to keep navigation sound all the time. There is a bug (xbmc or alsa) that when you play ac3, dts track and press spacebar to pause 2-3 secs and start playback again, you loose navsounds until restarting xbmc. See ticket: http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/7338

To correct this do as follows:

Code:
cp /usr/share/xbmc/system/keymaps/remote.xml .xbmc/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml
cp /usr/share/xbmc/system/keymaps/keyboard.xml .xbmc/userdata/keymaps/keyboard.xml
nano .xbmc/userdata/keymaps/*.xml


In both files at global settings change "Pause" to "Play"

That's it, now it is all done !! Big Grin

As a help here are a lot of test files (audio and video)
With for ex. the dts file you can test pass through with hdmi.
With the aac file you can test the multichannel LPCM capability of your setup etc.

Dedicated server with testfiles

It was a bit rough isn't it, but it is worth it. It will be more and more simpler as we go in time. I will try to update this guide to keep up to date as kernels, xbmc, alsa changes. Any suggestions, contributions wellcome. I hope it will work for everyone.


REVERT CHANGES FROM ALSA WAY

If you would like to revert back what we've don just do it as follows:

Code:
rm /etc/asound.conf
sudo cp /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf_backup /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf
cd ~
sudo ./Alsa_upgrade-1.0.21_hd.sh -r
sudo rm -rf /usr/src/Alsa*

And of course set pulseaudio in gnome sound settings as it wes.

RECOMPILE THE KERNEL MODULE AFTER KERNEL UPGRADE

If you regulary upgrade ubuntu packages you can run into kernel upgrades from time to time.
These overwrites our custom hda kernel modules. To recompile do as follows:

Code:
cd /usr/src/Alsa* && cd alsa-driver*
sudo make clean
sudo ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel --with-kernel=/usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo reboot

Or alternatively you can re-run the upgrade script.
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#3
PART 3: SETTING UP THE SYSTEM THE PULSEAUDIO WAY

After done Part 1, first we do a little post setting up with Alsa.

If you want to use Pulseaudio with dedicated htpc setup, like xbmcbuntu, you must install pulseaudio package first. Probably you also have to put pulseaudio -D in your xbmc startup script.

We will unmute the needed channels and store these settings:
Code:
/usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'Master',0 unmute && /usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'Master',0 100
/usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'IEC958 Default PCM',0 unmute
/usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'IEC958',0 unmute && /usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset 'IEC958',1 unmute
sudo alsactl store

Now we can test if everything went ok. First let's check out the Alsa Driver version and the available playback devices:

Code:
cat /proc/asound/version
aplay -l
alsamixer
The alsa driver version should be 1.0.21
aplay -l should show a HDMI device on card 0 device 3
alsamixer should show three iec devices, all has to be unmuted.

Now we create the config file for non pulseaudio compatible applications to be played through pulseaudio. Strangely xbmc's navigations sounds come out to native alsa while music and video sound use pulseaudio server natively.

Code:
sudo cp /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf /etc/asound.conf

Now we load some custom pulseaudio config files to define hw:0,3 (your hdmi device) as the default hw sink. Here we also define the channel numbers and channel order. We can do it with the default.pa file.
Code:
wget http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?dl=f14a2664c -O ~/.pulse/default.pa
dos2unix ~/.pulse/default.pa

You can tunde your setup changing this line in ~/.pulse/default.pa file
Code:
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,3 channels=6 channel_map=front-left,front-right,front-center,lfe,rear-left,rear-right

Now we set the default rate to 176400hz (It is a multiple of 44100 CD standard), 32bits, 6 channels, we set it in the daemon.conf file.
Code:
wget http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?dl=f34e8526f -O ~/.pulse/daemon.conf
dos2unix ~/.pulse/daemon.conf

You can tune your setup by changing these lines in ~/.pulse/deemon.conf file.
Code:
default-sample-format = s32le
default-sample-rate = 176400
default-sample-channels = 6
; resample-method = src-sinc-medium-quality
With the last line uncommented you can set a higher quality default resampler. After that pulseaudio will start using a little bit more cpu for software mixing.
The available sampler options are (by man pulse-daemon.conf)
Code:
src-sinc-best-quality,  src-sinc-medium-quality,  src-sinc-fastest,  src-zero-order-hold,  src-linear, trivial, speex-float-N, speex-fixed-N, ffmpeg

Make a reboot with sudo reboot.

Now we set up Gnome to use pulseaudio. Do it like this:

Image


XBMC SETUP PULSEAUDIO WAY

Setting up xbmc for pulseaudio is pretty easy. We turn off crossfading for now, because there is a slight stuttering in sound while crossfading. If anyone can help what is the cause we could reenable this feature.
Image Image

Note that with pulseaudio we loose passthrough as it is not supported yet by pulseaudio. But as we have multichannel lpcm sound we can just decode the streams and pass it in lpcm format to the receiver.

We can do a little testing if xbmc really uses pulseaudio nativly or not. Install pulse audio volume control utility.
Code:
sudo apt-get install pavucontrol
Run the program from main menu and open xbmc minimalized (press alt+q after start)
Note that while it is playing GUI sounds it is using the Alsa-plugin module.
Image
Notice that i have also run a totem session which was also playing music. Software mixing works great.

If you start playing a music tracks with xbmc it should appear like this.
Image
This means xbmc nativly using pulseaudio not through an alsa plugin rerouted to pulse.

This utility is great because you can also tune channel volume levels with it:
Image

That's it we are done. I have to tell that sometimes specially when a new stream starts i can hear a very slight stuttering in sound. This settles as thestream continues. I'd very much appriciate if someone could help me to solve this little glitch in it.

REVERT CHANGES FROM PULSEAUDIO WAY
If you would like to revert back what we've don just do it as follows.

Code:
rm ~/.pulse/default.pa ~/.pulse/daemon.conf /etc/asound.conf
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#4
After THAT much people was forcing me i added the pulseaudio alternative if anyone out there ever interested. Sad

I would not mind a little feedback.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.
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#5
Thanks for writing up a fantastic guide. Obviously a ton of time and detail. You should be commended.

I did try following these steps hoping it would fix my issues, but still no luck -- I am getting sound from some file types but still nothing from others.

In all screenshots of the alsamixer I see multiple channels. However on my machine I only see this:

Image

What am I doing wrong? When I run speaker-test -c6 I only get audio from L/R. Nothing from center or surrounds or LFE.

Oddly enough, XBMC still plays most mkv audio quite fine despite this, but has trouble with audio from some of the lower-end formats and most MOV files.

Any ideas?
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#6
great stuff, now i have to figure out how to patch alsa manually since i'm using Arch Linux.
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#7
toiva Wrote:great stuff, now i have to figure out how to patch alsa manually since i'm using Arch Linux.

It is actually not a patch. I just ecxhange the Alsa 1.0.21 version of the nvidia file with a brand new fresh one from git repository. That's it. You can do the Alsa upgrade this way:

get these packages ( i don't know about the Arch version) build-essential ncurses-dev gettext xmlto linux-headers-`uname -r`

Code:
cd ~
wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.21.tar.bz2
wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/lib/alsa-lib-1.0.21a.tar.bz2
wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/utils/alsa-utils-1.0.21.tar.bz2
sudo mkdir -p /usr/src/alsa
cd /usr/src/alsa
sudo cp ~/alsa* .
sudo tar xjf alsa-driver*
sudo tar xjf alsa-lib*
sudo tar xjf alsa-utils*
cd alsa-driver*
wget "http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-kernel.git;a=blob_plain;f=sound/pci/hda/patch_nvhdmi.c;hb=HEAD" -O sound/pci/hda/patch_nvhdmi.c
sudo ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel --with-kernel=/usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo make
sudo make install
cd ../alsa-lib*
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install
cd ../alsa-utils*
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install
rm -f ~/alsa-driver*
rm -f ~/alsa-lib*
rm -f ~/alsa-utils*
sudo depmod -a
sudo reboot
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.
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#8
BDPNA Wrote:What am I doing wrong? When I run speaker-test -c6 I only get audio from L/R. Nothing from center or surrounds or LFE.

Oddly enough, XBMC still plays most mkv audio quite fine despite this, but has trouble with audio from some of the lower-end formats and most MOV files.

Any ideas?

I think you might have a problem like him:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=59926

From Alsamixer i think the analog part is missing. I don't have a clue how that can happen. Isn't it turned off in Bios ?
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.
Reply
#9
Just out of curiosity, I would like to know if anyone has gotten SPDIF out to work on an Asus P5E-VM series motherboards with ALSA.

For the life of me I couldn't get SPDIF out to work on my P5E-VM HDMI board. I just ended up buying a Giagabyte board and it has been all good since.
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#10
Extremely useful and valuable guide Alan!
I can't wait to have a hdmi capable receiver to try this out.

@Romey-Rome
Your issue is unrelated to this topic and guide. Thread-jacking is not appreciated here... Please open an other topic for this one.
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#11
alanwww1 Wrote:After THAT much people was forcing me i added the pulseaudio alternative if anyone out there ever interested. Sad

I would not mind a little feedback.

Nice!

Until now XBMC+ION failed on HDA, so that is a BIG step forward.

Im looking forward to hear about the possibbilities to support the full DTS-HD and DDTrueHDSmile

Or with GT 210/GT 220? These cards maybe better in HDA?
(I found some MB with PCI-Express slot...)

Now we need support for Bluray...or we must download releases to have HD experience...Huh
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#12
bitlisz Wrote:Nice!

Until now XBMC+ION failed on HDA, so that is a BIG step forward.

Im looking forward to hear about the possibbilities to support the full DTS-HD and DDTrueHDSmile

Or with GT 210/GT 220? These cards maybe better in HDA?
(I found some MB with PCI-Express slot...)

Now we need support for Bluray...or we must download releases to have HD experience...Huh

Thanks for the feedback. So the guide helped you to set up things ?

Unfortunately the new G210/220 models "only" have 7.1 HD LPCM equipped. But even if the hardware supports DTS-HD, DDTrueHD bitstreaming (like the new ATI 58xx and Intel's yet unreleased motherboard chipsets) it will be a lot of time until the protected audio path can be utilized by open software (maybe never, or when it will be hacked). Even on windows it is only with Arcsoft mediaplayer and PowerDVD closed source mediaplayers have the license.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.
Reply
#13
alanwww1 Wrote:It is actually not a patch. I just ecxhange the Alsa 1.0.21 version of the nvidia file with a brand new fresh one from git repository. That's it. You can do the Alsa upgrade this way:

get these packages ( i don't know about the Arch version) build-essential ncurses-dev gettext xmlto linux-headers-`uname -r`

Alsa-utils wouldn't compile because of some xmlto related error (i did install it before compiling). But since i already had 1.0.21 libs and utilities installed from the Arch repository i skipped those and installed only the driver part.

I did things the "alsa way", and now speaker-test works with 44100, 48000 and 192000, earlier it would work only with 48000, so far so good..

Quote:ALSA pros:
- Native untouched crystal clear sound whatever format the sound has it goes directly to receiver
- no time delay in playback

These are the two things i'm after, untouched audio and that first second or so of every file wouldn't be missing. But it still is, and neither do the navigational sounds work.
I don't mind that there's a small gap missing when watching movies and skipping/forwarding/rewinding but it's nervewracking to have it happen with music :confused2:
Reply
#14
alanwww1 Wrote:Thanks for the feedback. So the guide helped you to set up things ?

Unfortunately the new G210/220 models "only" have 7.1 HD LPCM equipped. But even if the hardware supports DTS-HD, DDTrueHD bitstreaming (like the new ATI 58xx and Intel's yet unreleased motherboard chipsets) it will be a lot of time until the protected audio path can be utilized by open software (maybe never, or when it will be hacked). Even on windows it is only with Arcsoft mediaplayer and PowerDVD closed source mediaplayers have the license.

Sorry, I havent got any free ION pc now.
And Im not that linux expert at all (log ago used ubuntu sometime).
But i just wondering, couse I would like to get the perfect device for all of my media.

I installed several XBMC but only on win.
At least I have a lot of media and a decent receiver and now using Xtreamer media player, which is quite uncomplete.

But i will check back frequently.
Reply
#15
toiva Wrote:These are the two things i'm after, untouched audio and that first second or so of every file wouldn't be missing. But it still is, and neither do the navigational sounds work.
I don't mind that there's a small gap missing when watching movies and skipping/forwarding/rewinding but it's nervewracking to have it happen with music :confused2:

For Navsounds check if this gives you sound:
speaker-test -Ddefault -c2

Navsound ALWAYS use alsa device "default" no matter what device you set in gui for music.

Have you done the part of my guide with custom HDA-Intel.conf. Maybe in Arch-Linux it has a different location. Check that. Try to find it with:

sudo find / -name HDA-Intel.conf

With missing one second it is absolutely normal. It is also with my AV receiver. Note that it is because your av receiver does not "know" what format you are going to be playing, so you receiver has to switch between pcm formats when you start playing. But this is only with the album's first track's first second.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.
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[LINUX] HOW-TO get multi-channel HD sound output working over NVIDIA HDMI8