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

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

2013/12/13 James Board <jpboard2 at yahoo.com>:
>>Don't try. The instructions won't work with PulseAudio 0.9.x.
>
> Okay.  Thanks for the warning.  Actually, even though we didn't figure
> out the soultion, your posts were very helpful for me in many ways.  Thanks
> again.
>
> Maybe I will try a non-enterprise distro.  I used Fedora for years
> but the problem with Fedora is they drop support after 12 months.

Well, that's still more than the period of support by the original
software authors. Typically, original authors support only the latest
version of their creations, which means only 6 months of support. The
support ends in 12 months because within a given release, software is
generally not updated (exactly as in enterprise distributions) and
becomes obsolete and not supported by its original authors.

Maybe what you really want is a rolling-release distribution, such as
Arch, Gentoo or Debian Testing. It is updated daily and always
contains recent versions of software. Also, as long as you update at
least weekly, it is supported indefinitely.

> Here are the workarounds I'm thinking of
>
> 1) remove pulseaudio.  I really don't need all the functionality of mixed
> audio from multiple sources, or playing audio across a network.  Is it
> generally possible to remove pulseaudio and use only alsa?

Yes. But then, you'll have to deal with reconfiguring various pieces
of software (at least: gstreamer, all non-gstreamer players, the
default ALSA device, SDL, and I surely forgot a lot of stuff here) to
avoid talking to PulseAudio. That's quite tedious. Also you will have
to write an .asoundrc file (so that HDMI is used by default), but that
file has mostly undocumented syntax and many wrong or obsolete
examples in the web. I am quite sure that this would generate a lot
more support requests than just installing a recent distribution with
a supported-here version of pulseaudio.

> 2) Use an analog cable from the PC to the LCD TV.

This would also work. But please try a DVI-to-HDMI cable first, or, if
your card contains more than one HDMI output, try another one.

3) Load module-alsa-sink in the config (/etc/pulse/default.pa). This
would allow you to specify arbitrary ALSA devices, including
hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1, but can cause conflicts with autodetected
devices.

The correct line is:

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov