[SOLVED] Different Audio on Different HDMI Ports

I'm currently designing an HTPC which I'm hoping can be used to feed two different non-adjacent TV's. Each would be able to play their own videos through the two HDMI ports on the motherboard. I know how to do a multiple-desktop setup in which there are different visuals on the video outputs, but how can I apply that to audio? If I try playing video through two different instances of video players, even though HDMI carries the audio, the system will by default pool them together, making them unlistenable. Is there any way to get around this, so that, optimally, I can launch two instances of a video application that can only see one HDMI port each, both in sound and video?

I'm hoping to use Ubuntu with this, as that's the distro I'm most familiar with, but am open to any distro that would accomplish this. Thanks!

Hi

I use a distribution called "Gentoo", which comes more or less barebone. I don't want to say that you should switch to it, which could be quite hard, but I think that for your first experiments you should at least switch off the additional audio services like "pulseaudio", "jack" and anything you might have running related to audio, leaving only "alsa".

Once you've done it you can list all your HW-audio-devices with:

cat /proc/asound/pcm

...which could give you an output like the following one:

cat /proc/asound/pcm 00-03: NVIDIA HDMI : NVIDIA HDMI : playback 1 01-00: CMI8738-MC6 : C-Media PCI DAC/ADC : playback 1 : capture 1 01-01: CMI8738-MC6 : C-Media PCI 2nd DAC : playback 1 01-02: CMI8738-MC6 : C-Media PCI IEC958 : playback 1 : capture 1

If you see there the device that you want to use then use e.g. ...:

mplayer2 -ao alsa:device=hw=00.03 <some sound or movie file you want to use>

...to play your file over the hdmi interface you see above.

My other bigger PC using nVidia outputs the following with "cat /proc/asound/pcm"...

00-00: ALC892 Analog : ALC892 Analog : playback 1 : capture 1
00-01: ALC892 Digital : ALC892 Digital : playback 1
00-02: ALC892 Analog : ALC892 Analog : capture 1
01-03: HDMI 0 : HDMI 0 : playback 1
01-07: HDMI 0 : HDMI 0 : playback 1
01-08: HDMI 0 : HDMI 0 : playback 1
01-09: HDMI 0 : HDMI 0 : playback 1

...and it worked when issuing in parallel the commands...

mplayer2 -ao alsa:device=hw=00.03 <some sound or movie file you want to use>
mplayer2 -ao alsa:device=hw=00.07 <some sound or movie file you want to use>

...but 8 and 9 never worked, not even when used standalone, so I don't know what their scope is (too lazy).

So, basically, the answer to your question is: it should work.

Cheers,