[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH] fix profile configurations for IEC/SPDIF outputs

[pl bossart]

> Oh I see you completely removed the a52 plugin support... any reason?
> I'd rather the support was just fixed rather than removed completely.
>
> My patch should fix the assert, but not sure what the next stage of
> fixing it would be.
>
> Also your patch seems to use "hw:" names in the profiles. This is bad.
> any reason why it was changed? If there is a problem using iec958:%f on
> your machine, I'd expect it's an alsa bug. Using hw:%f,1 is almost
> certainly broken.

My patch was deliberately provocative to see if there were any good
reasons why things were the way they are....

I find it very strange to encode with a52 and rely on surround40. The
latter duplicates what PulseAudio could do, and the former is a lossy
codec that will decrease the audio quality while increasing the
workload on your computer. You are probably better off sending stereo
and letting your receiver doing the post-processing. If you are using
encoding as a means to work around the limitations of S/PDIF, then
change to HDMI, it'll remove the need for encoding and will give you a
better control on lip-sync.

Also I have two devices on my sound card, one is analog out and the
other is the digital out. Changing the configuration toggles between
the two sinks. I did not want to use the IEC plugin as it entails some
memory copies that are totally unnecessary, it works fine without it
so why bother?