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

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

2013/12/12 James Board <jpboard2 at yahoo.com>:
>>> Okay.  In pavucontrol, the Configuration tab lists both the HDMI
>>> and the Internal Audio.  But as far as I can tell, it merely lists them.
>>> I don't need to click on anything in that tab, right?
>>
>>You do.
>>
>>You need to select the correct profile. On my office computer, it lists
>>the "Off" profile, 4 HDMI Stereo profiles and 4 HDMI 5.1 profiles.
>
> I see.  Okay for the Analog card, there are many choices.  For the HDMI
> card, there are only two choices: HDMI and off.  Pavucontrol->Configuration
> doesn't list that many choices for the HDMI card.

Then your distribution's pulseaudio is too old and does not support
cards with multiple HDMI devices. Such old distributions are not
recommended for general desktop usage.

This feature first appeared in PulseAudio 2.0. There may be a way to
add it to a system with earlier PulseAudio, though, but it is
completely unsupported and can damage your system.

1. Download these files:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/plain/src/modules/alsa/mixer/profile-sets/extra-hdmi.conf
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/plain/src/modules/alsa/mixer/paths/hdmi-output-0.conf
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/plain/src/modules/alsa/mixer/paths/hdmi-output-1.conf
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/plain/src/modules/alsa/mixer/paths/hdmi-output-2.conf
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/plain/src/modules/alsa/mixer/paths/hdmi-output-3.conf

2. As root, copy extra-hdmi.conf to
/usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/ and hdmi-output-*.conf
to /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/

3. Find the 90-pulseaudio.rules file on your system. It is either in
/lib/udev/rules.d or in /etc/udev/rules.d. As root, add this before
the last line:

# NVidia and Intel HDAs often have more than one HDMI codec/port on
the same card
ATTRS{vendor}=="0x10de", ENV{PULSE_PROFILE_SET}="extra-hdmi.conf"
ATTRS{vendor}=="0x8086", ENV{PULSE_PROFILE_SET}="extra-hdmi.conf"

4. Reboot.

> Also, I am running pavucontrol as root, which you told me not to do.  When I
> run
> pavucontrol as non-root, it immediately core dumps.

In your home directory, try erasing the following files and
directories to return to a clean state:

.pulse
.config/pavucontrol.ini
.config/pulse (but this appeared only in a later release than you have)

If this doesn't help, then please change your linux distribution to
something less broken.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov