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

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

"James Board" <jpboard2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I tried the DVI outputs from the video card, but could not get that to
work.
>
> However, I added this line to /etc/pulse/default.pa (as you suggested),
> restarted pulseaudio, and it worked:
>
>     load-module module-alsa-sink device=hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1

So use it with mplayer -ao pulse

>
> However, I don't know why.  The working mplayer command uses a different
device number
>
>     mplayer FILE.avi -ao alsa:device=hw=1.7

This tells mplayer to go through ALSA directly. Please don't do that, as it
will disable pulseaudio from accessing the card. Pulseaudio will then
redirect all its output to the dummy device, and I don't want to read
support emails about that.

As for the mismatched numbers, that's an ugly internal detail of ALSA. HDMI
device 1, for cards managed by the snd-hda-intel driver, is indeed hw
device 7.

> Then, I removed the above line from /etc/pulse/default.pa, restarted
pulseaudio, and it
> still worked.  So. it works, and I'm happy.  But I don't know why.

It only pretends to work. If you use pulseaudio, all sound must go through
it, either natively or through the "default" ALSA device. I.e. please
forget about "hdmi" and "hw" outside of the configuration file of
pulseaudio.
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