Greetings,
I'm having trouble with Dolby Digital Surround sound on mandrake 10.1 with a Sound Blaster Live! (emu10k1) I'm running the ALSA driver on the 2.6 kernel. I tried the OSS driver, but the OSS driver is even worse than the ALSA one. With the OSS driver I got no audio at all.

The audio will turn on and off 5 times a second. Exactly like hitting the mute button repeatedly while watching TV. The Dolby Digital LED on my decoder flashes on and off too.

At first I thought it might be Xine itself, so I installed the version of xine (which worked properly) from Mandrake 10.0 but to no avail. Stands to reason it must be the ALSA driver, but I don't know how to upgrade to the previous version. RPMs don't like going backwards.

I'm getting to the stage where I want to re-compile the kernel, but if it's the source code itself that's in error a recompile will accomplish nothing.

I'd appreciate any advise anyone can give to help me with this one.

Thanks

The sound going in-and-out makes me wonder if you have the KDE 3.2 bug that came packaged with Mandrake 10.1

press ctrl+esc and check out your resources. Is KDE hogging 90-99% of your resources? This is a bug and it has been fixed with the 70+ released a few days ago.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I've installed all the updates, which is good because it's fixed the problem of my USB key not working properly.

I havnt tried loading Gnome instead of KDE... I'll try that. (I'm getting desperate)

I didn't know you can do the CTRL + ESC. Thing. That's good. I'll never have to type PS AUX or TOP again.

I booted into GNOME instead of KDE and I'm still getting the same audio output as before.

Am I the only person to experience this problem?

Am I the only person to have a Soundblaster Live! sound card who plays DVDs?

No, you are not the only one
I just experienced exactly the same although under fedora core 3.
Try downloading a kernel from kernel.org and compiling that yourself, that solved it for me.
I have tried kernel 2.6.7 and 2.6.10 (I think others work just as well) and with them I am able to play dvd's with dolby digital output to a receiver.
This is with alsa 1.0.6-5, xine-lib 1.0 and using a soundblaster live (emu10k1)