spdif problem opensuse 10.3

kamkos · 02-24-2008, 06:28 PM

hey,

I am having opensuse 10.3 and i have encountered a problem with spdif.
When i watch a DVD movie in kaffeine and the sound is set up as "passing through" the sound goes through spdif. Nevertheless, when i want to watch a divx or even to listen some music then the sound only goes through the analog connection.

It used to be that whenever i watched a dvd and once i am done i wanted to listen to hear music from spdif i had to restart KDE. It is not happening anymore and i am wondering why. My external amplifier has a light that means that the signal is comming from the pc but there is no sound at all. I tried different volume setting but without luck:

The output of alsa-info.sh is at http://pastebin.ca/916888.

Any help will be appreciated.
kamkos

Frank64 · 02-27-2008, 11:23 AM

Hi,

I don't believe I will help, but I would like to discuss and keep that tread rolling.

There is a lot of complexity around AC3 and surround sound, at least with opensuse and possibly Linux. It is hard to follow up and get everything to work properly.

The sound goes through spdif if it's AC3/DTS, or if you force spdif output by default. But to get the full 6 channels (real sound, not upmixing) you have to go through spdif. Which a DVD does anyway.

When you listen to music through spdif, you usually need a config somewhere, otherwise since it's not AC3 it uses analog 3.5mm output.

I think that you might be hitting a "device/resource busy" problem. Cuz I have the exact same symptoms as you do.

I was able ONE day only to make all my sounds of all applications go through spdif output (was nice! I miss it), whether they were surround or stereo. Including music with Amarok. I then installed a sound plugin (which I don't remember!), rebooted and since then it does not work anymore! But I know the sound wants to go through.

When you do in command line "mplayer filename.ext" it will tell you if the audio resource is busy, you will see an error msg. Maybe you have the same problem. I am trying to fix it but I got no luck at all and I can't find a history of the last packages installed through yast.

Cuz I think it's related to a package, maybe you happened to install the same.

I would also suggest you do the following in either your home/.asoundrc or /etc/asound.conf config file (it forces output to spdif by default):

Code:

1st way:

pcm.!default spdif

2nd way (if above doesn't work):

pcm.!default {
       type hw
       card 0
       device 2
}

3rd way (if you have more than one sound card / need resampling / other funkiness ):

Obviously you will need to change the pcm string line to match your setup. The output of aplay -L will probably help.

pcm.!default {
       type plug
       slave.pcm "iec958:CARD=V8235,DEV=0" # taken from aplay -L
       slave.rate 48000 # optional resampling to 48kHz
}

Or read this http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Dolby_D...ut_(AC3,_SPDIF)

Maybe tweaking the config files will help you out... I hope.