[pulseaudio-discuss] [RFC PATCH 4/4] switch-on-connect: Do not ignore HDMI sinks

[João Paulo Rechi Vita]

On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 2:35 AM Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2018-08-07 at 22:00 -0700, João Paulo Rechi Vita wrote:
> > HDMI ports are normally present on cards connected to an internal bus,
> > and module-switch-on-connect should switch to them when a HDMI monitor
> > is plugged.
> >
> > This is specially relevant on setups where the HDMI port of a machine is
> > connected to a different audio card then the analog outputs, which is
> > the case for machines with AMD graphics cards.
>
> As I mentioned in an earlier mail, it's not generally a good idea to
> switch to HDMI automatically, due to the possible lack of speakers on
> the monitor, so do you really want to do this chage? I'm fine with this
> patch, though, because if the decision to switch to a HDMI profile has
> already been made, it's pretty logical to switch output to it in
> module-switch-on-connect.
>

I see your point and I understand the implications. We recently
checked the behavior on Windows and it always switches the audio to
HDMI no matter what (even with headphones connected), so that tends to
be the expectation from OEMs. We may change our mind at some point,
but for now we are sticking with that policy downstream. Ideally all
the changes we are making to support this case will be generic enough
that they make sense upstream as well and we only have a small
downstream patch set changing the ports / profiles priorities.

As you mentioned, when this code runs the decision to switch the card
profile to HDMI has already been made. But on setups where one card
has the analog ports and another card has only HDMI ports, the HDMI
card will always switch to a HDMI profile when HDMI is connected, and
(unless I'm missing something) the streams will be moved over to the
HDMI sink.

Let me know if the above comment makes sense, and if you still want to
have this patch upstream, in which case I can re-send it as a MR.

Thanks,

--
João Paulo Rechi Vita
http://about.me/jprvita