[mythtv-users] Working AC3 passthrough

[Johan Heikkilä]

Thanks to the archive of this great mailing list, I finally got AC3
pass through working. I've been running MythTV for a couple of years
now, but never figured out how to get AC3 pass through working with
the Internal player (DVB-C and DVD) to SPDIF. I didn't care much,
because Mplayer and Xine have worked just fine (my sound card is an
internal Terratech Aureon 5.1 PCI).

Almost by coincidence, I wanted to try to use the Internal player
(I've been running SVN for a long time) and I found out that I had to
set the pass through device to:

ALSA:iec958:AES0=0x06,AES1=0x82,AES2=0x00,AES3=0x02

OK, it is not perfect. When using time stretch, my external amp looses
some of the channels (the AC3 indication goes off). But you can't have
everything...

Thanks for sharing knowledge on this list!
Johan