[mythtv-users] Sound card recommendation

Evil Nathan evilnathan at gmail.com
Wed Dec 22 15:20:37 UTC 2004


Just a quick note, and I didn't see this mentioned earlier.

I have the optical output from my motherboard (P4P800E-D) run to my 
reciever.  It works fantastic, with one caviat:

My reciever (and I know this is true for quite a few of them) only likes 
digital sound sent to it at 48000KHz (or possibly higher).  This isn't an 
issue for anything built into myth.  (mythmusic works fine, mythtv works 
fine).  That being said, you will probably have to tweak your configs for 
some of the external media players/game programs.

For example, mplayer sends out the sound in whatever samplerate the file is 
encoded at, so I added the following line to my 
/usr/share/mplayer/mplayerconf:
af="resample=48000"
and now pretty much everything plays fine.  If the program is encoded with 
5.1, it handles it fine.  (with a couple extra flags sent to mplayer of 
course)

Most decent programs will have a samplerate option somewhere in them, so it 
should be no problem getting it to work. (I have xmame/xmess, zsnes, and 
dosbox all working great)

Also, I've been told that you could have alsa resample everything to 48000 
on it's own, but I haven't gotten that far.

So far, it's only been the odd game, and 'funny' app that won't send sound 
via the SP/DIF connector on my motherboard.

As an FYI, before using the onboard card, I used both a Herculese 7.1 
(Cirrus Logic chipset I believe), SBLive, and a built in intel sound 
chipset, and I had no problems whatsoever with the SP/DIF.

Good luck!




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