[pulseaudio-discuss] Help with CMI8768 Please

[Jim Duda]

On 09/12/2009 10:54 AM, Jim Duda wrote:

> Unfortunately, although this works great for music, attempting to play mpeg
> videos is a problem. When I use mplayer to play mpeg videos with 5 channel
> sound, mplayer uses liba52 to decode the channels. When playing through
> pulse and subsequently a52 (to go back to digital), the sound is all
> choppy.
> I suspect this has to do with the a52 plugin as I've read in various posts
> that it may not be thread safe.

I love answering my own questions ... !!!

I realized a couple of bonehead things I was doing.

For mplayer, I was using -ao alsa:device=default.
Using -ao pulse works much better with mplayer.

Same for xine.  Switching from "default" to "pulseaudio" for the
audio.driver works much better.

>
> I'm hoping I'm just confused on how best to utilize pulse with spdif
> to my surround box. I want to be able to upmix my stereo to 6 channels
> over digital and also be able to play my mpegs via mplayer and dvds
> via xine all over digital spdif using pulse in the middle. I just
> cannot seem to get it all working properly.

So, my final question is:

Is there anything wrong using the alsa a52 plugin to encode the
pulse 6 channels to dolby digital for spdif connection to my
surround box?

Is there a preferred "pulse" way of doing this?

Jim