[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulse Audio and Ubuntu

[Luke Yelavich]

On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 04:35:59AM EST, Joel Madero wrote:
> 2. How does Ubuntu get Pulseaudio to control entire system including Flash
> content. I have gotten HDMI sound fine with everything outside of Flash in
> bodhi linux but as of yet Flash fails consistently to output through HDMI
> using Pulse -- I have gotten HDMI 2.0 sound with flash using .asoundrc

Speaking with my PulseAudio Ubuntu co-maintainer hat on here. In Ubuntu, we configure ALSA to use the ALSA pulseaudio plugin. The ALSA pulse plugin has an extra piece of code that detects if PulseAudio is running. This requires extra asoundrc bits to make work properly, but when set up, PulseAudio will be used if it is running. By default PulseAudio is configured to be automatically spawned, so unless a user has explicitly disabled spawning, then all applications that are configured to use ALSA will end up being routed via PulseAudio for output. 

If you are looking for code that implements this, have a look at /usr/share/alsa/pulse*.conf files on a recent Ubuntu system to see how it is done.

Luke