[pulseaudio-discuss] Front panel (headphone) output not working

[Lassi Väätämöinen]

Hi,

I have been playing around with the headphones output for a while now with 
KDE, and I am unable to ger headphones properly output audio in KDE/openSUSE. 
My problem is that connecting headphones to the front panel in normal case 
mutes speaker (rear) output, but there is no output from the headphones. Also 
the Analog Stereo output is shown going muted on Kmix (and alsamixer as well).

Phonon settings and 'pacmd list-sinks' shows only one output device: "Internal 
Audio Analog stereo". List-sinks in addition shows:

        ports:
                analog-output: Analog Output (priority 9900)
                analog-output-headphones: Analog Headphones (priority 9000)


When connecting the headphones, the output port stays as "analog-output", and 
with pacmd manually setting sink port to "analog-output-headphones" gives me 
output to headphones, while keeping speaker output muted. 

I've also been playing around with kmix and alsamixer, and in some "random" 
cases after connecting headphones and muting/unmuting the Internal Analog 
stereo or some channels related to "headphones" or " Independent HP" in 
Alsamixer gives me output on both my speaker output and headphones.

I tried the same thing in Gnome env, and it lists the two outputs for the same 
card, from which headphones can then be selected and speakers go muted, but 
not automatically in that case either. However, having some sort of proper 
behavior for this issue seems to be related to KDE/Phonon, am I right? (I have 
also played around with the start-pulseaudio-kde -script and set 
"do_routing=0" there, in order to get Skype sounds working, due to some 
phonon/pulseaudio device ordering not working properly. But that should have 
no effect here, I guess..)

In which level should the headphone switching be handled? Pulseaudio, Phonon 
or or ALSA? 

Additional info about my system:

Codec: VIA VT1708B 8-Ch

pactl 0.9.22
Compiled with libpulse 0.9.22
Linked with libpulse 0.9.22
libphonon4  4.5.0-3.3
alsactl version 1.0.24.2


Cheers,
-Lassi