No HDMI Audio despite showing up unmuted in alsamixer
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It's been my limited experience that you should see more in aplay -l if hdmi is working. For me, card 0,0 and 0,1 are for analog and digital (for me 0,1 is for optical). Card 1,0 (now 1,3 with newer kernel) is hdmi.
You probably need to update your alsa drivers. Currently I am using the .19 driver. Until I started using that driver my HDMI sound device did not show up.
Last edited by Unmindfulawe; 05-15-2009 at 10:55 PM.
The asus webpage shows alsa 1.0.16 supports but no specific mention about HDMI (that I saw rapidly).
The alsa changes pages indicate some activity with hda-intel.
Changes for V1.0.18 to .18a as well as changes from .18 to .19 indicate hdmi audio support is added and also that some patches are added. .19 to .20 changes show some reversion on the patches. Unmindfulawe's advice is probably valid and you should try newer alsa.
I'm not familiar with your mboard. On mine, hdmi audio out shows up as card 1, whereas all other sound output comes off of card 0. Is it possible your 0:1 is out for all digital, i.e. the output to the optical is parallel and concurrent with hdmi? Who knows.
Unmindfulawe, do you have ich10 and if so, how does your hdmi audio show up?
Once you get some indication that your hdmi port is seen by the PC, actually getting sound out of it might still be another step. For me with a amd (ati) chip, the video driver has to enable sound to be carried out of the hdmi port. This is only accomplished using the proprietary fglrx driver (Catalyst), or with the current git of radeonhd.
I'm not familiar with nvidia or intel but the situation could be similar.
So there are two steps. 1) getting hardware to recognize hdmi audio port and 2) having proper video driver (and xorg.conf options) to enable/combine output out of the graphic hdmi port. Hope this helps.
My HDMI audio is snd-hda-intel. Since it's my ATI HD4550 soundcard that is feeding the HDMI out. It's very limited though. Stereo 16 bit 48kHz. It supposedly does 5.1, but that's through AC3 codecs only. I believe I've gotten it to work. But I much prefer my 24 bit 96kHz Delta 44 (snd-ice1712).
cat /proc/asound/cards
If it's not card 0, you need to explicitly tell the application to use the OTHER soundcard. Or change your configuration to accomplish the same.
Well, here are my thoughts on this situation. You say that you can see the HDMI output while in the alsamixer and it is turned up all the way but you still have no sound. You are using the Asus Rampage II Gene motherboard which if I'm not mistaken does not have an integrated graphics chipset. Which then begs me to believe that you are using an NVIDIA graphics card with an HDMI output. But here's the problem... it is my understanding that a great deal of non integrated graphics cards will have a spdif input which attaches to the spdif output coming from the motherboard which then the graphics card would pass-through the sound through your HDMI cable. That sound is then processed by the device that is interfaced using the HDMI cable. So, there are some more questions that need to answered; what graphics card are you using? What are you pluging the HDMI cable into. A computer monitor? A television set ? An audio receiever ? I think in order to solve this we need as much info about your setup as possible. :-) @Forum I do not have the same chipset (ICH10) on my motherboard. I read the previous posts too quickly and oversaw that there was an NVIDIA driver installed and falsely assumed that it was an NVIDIA audio chipset. So, to sum up, I believe that since you see the HDMI audio as a device and you aren't getting any audio then could it be that you just need to plug in a connector from your motherboard to your graphics card?
Last edited by Unmindfulawe; 05-16-2009 at 12:21 PM.
Unmindfulawe: you are correct. It didn't occur to me that the mboard wouldn't have integrated graphics/hdmi. I looked at specs and owners manual and it doesn't. How then does alsa mixer see anything that is hdmi?
In any event, it looks like a separate cable from the audio output to something on the video card is needed. Then the video driver will still have to support. A quick websearch shows many people had trouble with this. I didn't search long enough to see if anyone solved it. Probably depends on the card.
See, if you look at it from the perspective of the operating system then everything is making sense. See you have the graphics card plugged in and it has the capability to output audio through the HDMI output. Since you have the proprietary NVIDIA driver installed then the HDMI capability appears under the ALSA mixer. So when you turn up the volume in the alsamixer you are turning up the volume of nothing as the cable going from the motherboard to the graphics card is not present. So yes, after reviewing the manual for your motherboard, you should have an spdif output on the motherboard itself which consists of two pins. If you download the manual or have the paper version it shows which pins to plug the cable into under the section 2.2.1 (motherboard overview). I'm not sure where it plugs into on the graphics card itself as I do not have enough info about your graphics card. If your graphics card did not come with the spdif cable you will most likely have troubles findind this cable as it isn't a common one. Your best bet is this location. http://cgi.ebay.com/nVIDIA-9800-GX2-...3A1%7C294%3A50
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