[pulseaudio-discuss] Auto-switching to and from HDMI ports (audio)

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Fri, 2012-03-16 at 02:48 +0100, David Henningsson wrote:
> As I see it we have a couple of options.
> 
>   * no auto switching between HDMI and analog outputs at all. This is 
> probably the simplest option. But maybe this is not the most user 
> friendly option?
> 
>   * full switching. This requires not only profile switching on plug and 
> unplug, but also switching between cards, i e moving streams between 
> cards, and updating the default sink. More work, but definitely doable. 
> I get the feeling that we want to avoid updating the default sink when 
> it's not a direct user action though?

I guess you are more familiar with the use cases, but wouldn't it be
common to attach a monitor without wanting to use the monitor's audio
output? If that's the case, I think auto-switching isn't really a good
idea.

If you are going to do the auto-switching anyway, I think the default
sink should be changed too. Behaving differently with existing and
not-yet-existing streams doesn't make sense to me.

>   * switching only if the HDMI outputs are on the same card as the 
> analog output. This is also simple to achieve, but might be confusing 
> for users and support engineers?
> 
>   * switching from HDMI but never to HDMI: assuming we're not certain 
> that the user wants to use HDMI audio just because (s)he plugged it in, 
> we could quite safely assume that (s)he does not want to use an 
> unplugged HDMI cable. However, if we want to do this consistently, we 
> still suffer from having to set the default sink.
> 
> What do you think?

For what it's worth (I'm not a usability expert), to me the last option
sounds the best policy, with default sink updating.

-- 
Tanu