[pulseaudio-discuss] How to decode and loop-back and iec958/spdif bitstream?

[Benjamin Tegge]

Hello,

I want to feed a 5.1 stream (dca or a52) from another device through a
iec958/spdif connection to my computer and play the audio through
loopback on the computer, I don't want to do pass-through. The C-Media
CM106-based device used with PulseAudio and the loopback module on
Ubuntu 14.04 (PulseAudio 4.0) work in stereo, but 5.1 does not.

I wanted to set this up for quite some time, but was puzzled how all the
parts come together:
- There is iecset from the alsa tools to configure iec958 ports
(audio/data, consumer/pro), but this is just for outgoing connections,
right?
- Are there decoding functions in PulseAudio or would I have to use an
external program like ffmpeg/avconv to demux and decode the spdif
bitstream to PCM? I already found
https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-devices.html#pulse and tried that, but
couldn't get 5.1 to work.

What am I missing or what would I need to do to get this working?


Best regards, Benjamin