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

[Tom Gundersen]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 9:05 AM, David Henningsson
<david.henningsson at canonical.com> wrote:
> On 03/16/2012 03:06 AM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> I don't know how common it is to want to use, vs does not want to use, the
> audio output of an HDMI monitor. That's part of why I'm asking :-)
>
> Also, I don't know if it's possible/common that the HDMI monitor lies to us
> about its audio capabilities, so that it would say that it has audio
> capabilities when it does not. I did however test connecting my DVI monitor
> over HDMI and that one correctly did not show up as having audio
> capabilities.

I guess a common case is to connect to a TV over HDMI, and that most
TV's correctly report audio capabilities (as they have at least an
inbuilt 10W speaker). However, unless the TV is connected to proper
external speakers (which I guess we cannot tell?), I assume the HDMI
audio should be the last preference and not be switched to
automatically?

Cheers,

Tom