[pulseaudio-discuss] Automatic dts/ac3 format setting for attached displays

[Alexander Shashkevich]

Hello,

About two years ago in mailing list was submitted a patch for review (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2013-June/017533.html <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2013-June/017533.html>) that allowed to set automatically dts/ac3 formats according to ELD for HDMI attached displays/receivers. As I can see for some reasons patch wasn’t integrated.

At the moment users that have displays or receivers capable to decode dts/ac3 streams should set this formats manually using cli or pavucontrol. Popular distros doesn’t include pavucontrol by default and users should install it from packages manually. Distro maintainers logic is reasonable: why we should include in basic installation any additional sound control tools like pavucontrol, when all modern Desktop Environments are their own tools for sound control? Including several sound control tools is ambiguous user experience. Sounds reasonable, but Desktop Environment tools are very basic and they do not allow to fine tune many settings, like support of extra formats. This leads to problem: users have hardware that supports ac3/dts decoding, but it doesn’t recognized automatically by sound system, so they can't get it working without additional non-obvious (for users) steps. Meanwhile sound systems in all major OSes, like OSX and Windows, do recognize such hardware automatically and no additional configuring is required, so any media application can passthrough binary streams to receivers/displays in their default configuration.

Is something blocking to achieve same functionality in pulseaudio? Especially that patch is already exists.

Regards,
Alexander
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