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

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

2013/12/13 James Board <jpboard2 at yahoo.com>:
>>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.
>>
>>If this doesn't help, then please change your linux distribution to
>>something less broken.
>
> Thanks for your help and I will try those things.

Don't try. The instructions won't work with PulseAudio 0.9.x.

> My Linux distribution is fairly new.  I'm running CentOS 6.4 which was
> released in March
> this year. The latest version of CentOS is 6.5, so I'm only behind by 0.1.
> And CentOS
> is a clone of Red Hat, which is one of the most popular Linux distros.

It is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That's why it has obsolete
software that is no longer supported except by Red Hat engineers. And
since you are not a paying customer of Red Hat, they won't support you
either.

And here is a reasoning behind Enterprise distributions: they never
break anything for years (which is important on servers and in big
corporations), but the price is that they also never fix anything
except security issues and never update non-leaf software packages
even between the point versions, because this might break some
in-house thing, which is, again, a no-no in big corporations. So you
are not just behind by 0.1, but will always be stuck in 2010 as long
as you stick with CentOS 6.x releases.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to upgrade PulseAudio in CentOS, even
by building from source, because (due to shared library
incompatibility) this WILL break all existing applications there.

If an enterprise distribution works for you, great, it will continue
working for 10 years on the same hardware even if you upgrade to next
point releases. If it doesn't (which is exactly your case) - deal with
it, it is essentially unfixable. Or invent workarounds. In your case,
such workaround may be to use a DVI-to-HDMI cable, because nowadays
there are no true DVI ports, they are almost all HDMI in disguise, and
maybe that's what is DEV=0 on your computer.

Once again, enterprise distributions are not recommended for home
users. Next time, please install any of the following: Mint, OpenSUSE,
Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu (including variants like Xubuntu), Gentoo, or
Debian Testing (not Stable, because this is essentially an enterprise
distribution, and they themselves recommend Testing for home desktop
users).

> Do you think the fact that I can't run pavucontrol as a regular user has
> anything
> to do with it?

I don't know.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov