[pulseaudio-discuss] ALSA sink enumeration and multiple devices/subdevices

[pl bossart]

> If I hack /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/default.conf to
> change hdmi-stereo's device-strings value to e.g. "hdmi:%f,0", "hdmi:%f,1",
> etc., then I can cause pulseaudio to open whichever subdevice I wish. This
> proves to me that this is simply an enumeration issue and nothing more
> fundamental.

I beg to disagree..
I have done similar work and I think there's something fundamentally
broken in the ALSA/PulseAudio interaction for HDMI support(See my
posts on the ALSA mailing list). On my Intel IbexPeak, there's only
one HDMI device, but it is detected even though there's no cable
connected. I can play audio on HDMI even if I unplug the cable.
I would assume this is the same case for your Nvidia system, even if
you hacked the profile definition, you would end-up with a set of
detected profiles, but only one may work and only if there's a cable
connected. That would beat any audio policy/device manager/intelligent
routing logic.

For HDMI, I think the right solution is to have some ALSA hot-plug
event trapped by PulseAudio. Otherwise it's going to be really
confusing for users. With Nvidia hardware, they would have to manually
select which profile they want to play on, when they will want to play
on the device that has a cable attached.

Along the same lines, there's currently no means to know how many
channels the receiver supports. We could add HDMI
stereo/surround40/surround51/surround 71 profiles, but this is the
least user-friendly solution. Again we do need some hot-plug event to
set the relevant number of channels for the PulseAudio HDMI sink based
on ELD/EDID information.
-Pierre