[pulseaudio-discuss] Playing audion on TV through HDMI cable with mplayer

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

James Board wrote:
> I made some more progress.  I ran start-pulseaudio-x11 as a regular
> user, then
> when I ran pavucontrol as root, it displayed the pavucontrol tabs
> correctly.  But
> I still can not play audio on the TV through the HDMI cable.

You should never run pulseaudio or pavucontrol as root. Please use 
consolekit or systemd/logind, depending on how old your distribution is.

> In the Configuration tab, it's obvious which card is the HDMI output.  But
> there is nothing to select in that tab.

I am not sure what you mean. When people say "nothing to select", 
sometimes they mean "empty menu with no text at all", and sometimes 
"only one item, already selected, nothing else to try". It would help if 
you post the output of the following command:

pacmd ls

>  I then went to the Output tab and
> pressed the green "set as fallback" button. However, when I play a video
> file
> with mplayer, no sound occurs.  However, there is a 'sound level' bar, or
> something like that on the Output tab.  When I play a video file with
> mplayer,
> that sound level bar moves as if audio was actually playing.  Only
> everything
> is silent.

This suggests that there is some problem below PulseAudio, i.e. at ALSA 
level. Please run the following tests as a regular user and post the 
results here.

0. Make sure that PulseAudio is out of the way:

pasuspender bash

And run the commands from other steps in this bash.

1. cat /proc/asound/cards

This should list the ALSA hardware cards. E.g. here in the office, I 
have this:

  0 [MID            ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel MID
                       HDA Intel MID at 0xf9ff4000 irq 51
  1 [NVidia         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
                       HDA NVidia at 0xfbc7c000 irq 17

and it is obvious that for HDMI output I need the NVidia card.

2. aplay -L

This should list the ALSA software devices. You should verify that it 
lists at least one HDMI device. Here is what it says here in the office 
(minus the non-HDMI devices):

hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0
     HDA NVidia, HDMI 0
     HDMI Audio Output
hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1
     HDA NVidia, HDMI 0
     HDMI Audio Output
hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=2
     HDA NVidia, HDMI 0
     HDMI Audio Output
hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=3
     HDA NVidia, HDMI 0
     HDMI Audio Output

3. Perform a sanity check using analog output. This is necessary so that 
we know that a failure (if any) in step 4 is indeed related to HDMI. Run 
a command similar to the following:

speaker-test -l2 -c2 -D front:CARD=MID,DEV=0

It should produce some hissing noise through the analog speakers.

4. For all HDMI devices, try to make some noise through them, like this:

speaker-test -l2 -c2 -D hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0

For each device, it should take no longer than 20 seconds. If it "hangs" 
longer, this indicates a problem. For one device, it should actually 
produce some noise. Please take note which device produces noise (if 
any), and post the result here.

5. Reenable PulseAudio:

exit

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov