[pulseaudio-discuss] HDMI sink is stereo-only

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Xavier Bestel at 23/01/11 20:24 did gyre and gimble:
> Le dimanche 23 janvier 2011 à 10:16 +0000, Colin Guthrie a écrit :
>> IIUC, HDMI is a digital output and as such only accepts either stereo
>> PCM or pre-encoded streams that you pass through directly without any
>> mixing or interference.
> 
> Well, IIUC you're speaking about optical outputs which have the bandwith
> only for stereo PCM or dolby/dts encoded 6/7/8 channels, whereas HDMI
> has the bandwidth & protocol for 8 channels. See
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Multimedia_Interface

In that case PA should just piggy back on the ALSA devices
"surround51:1" etc. (where 1 is the card number of the HDMI).

There are some reasons why it may not work (there are a few threads
about it on alsa-devel from a while back now I look), but if you can
make it work with speaker-test -Dsurround51:1 -c6 -twav then all should
be well.

Failing all that, just try this:

1. Set the card profile to "Off" for the HDMI card in pavucontrol or
gnome-volume-control.
2. Run: pacmd load-module module-alsa-sink sink_name=HDMI device=hw:1,3
channels=6

That could work.

Col

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Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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