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

[Christian Giordano]

I added Steward in the loop who is responsible for the specifications for
the multi-monitor experience. In the current
specs<https://docs.google.com/a/canonical.com/document/d/1aHvJ-iIw-59bXTYBmIhQqEx0za2h9jpFE_RhZ2VOvJc/edit>there
is the possibility of UI being prompted when an unknown display is
connected for the first time. This panel could eventually contain an option
for the audio as well.


Cheers, chr


On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 1:48 AM, David Henningsson <
david.henningsson at canonical.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm not exactly sure who I should send this to, so maybe I'm a little too
> inclusive here. Anyway.
>
> The use case here is that your laptop speakers are active (or at least
> currently selected) and you plug an HDMI [1] cable in and activate the
> screen.
> Should we, or should we not, automatically change the audio output to be
> to the HDMI output?
> And likewise, when the cable is unplugged / the HDMI screen deactivated,
> should we, or should we not, change the audio output back to the speakers?
>
> So there's a design decision that needs to be made, and probably quite
> quickly if it should go into PulseAudio 2.0 and/or Ubuntu 12.04.
>
> The current behaviour is inconsistent, e g I've got bugs filed for Ubuntu
> 11.10 for machines that switch to HDMI on plug but not from HDMI on unplug.
>
> To complicate matters, and to go a little bit into the technical stuff,
> the HDMI output is sometimes a separate card, and sometimes on the same
> card as the analog outputs. When I originally wrote module-switch-on-port-
> **available, I admit not having thought thoroughly about switching
> between HDMI and analog outputs.
>
> 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?
>
>  * 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?
>
> --
> David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
> http://launchpad.net/~diwic
>
> [1] The exact same applies to DisplayPort. Seen from userspace,
> DisplayPort and HDMI appears in the same way. I've just written HDMI
> everywhere for simplicity.
>
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