[mythtv-users] ALSA Digital output

Nick knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Thu Aug 25 01:33:51 UTC 2005


On 8/25/05, Peter Judge <peter at judge.co.za> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 13:54 +0200, Peter Osterberg wrote:
> 
> > mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 is the correct setting for analog output
> > mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.3 should be the correct setting for digital output
> 
> I'll second the suggestion to look through the wiki. But shouldn't the
> device above be 0,3 (that's a comma, not a full-stop/period)?
> 
> -- Peter

It should be a comma. If the comma is placed at the end of the line,
I'm sure it means if the specified device is not available, sound will
be routed through the default ALSA device.

I've found when trying to figure out ALSA using 'aplay -l' and 'aplay
-L' are very useful.

1) 'aplay -l' will give a list of hardware playback devices including
their device IDs. This means you can easily see which device number
relates to which type of output device (analog, SPDIF etc).
2) 'aplay -L' will give a longer list of devices that ALSA can use,
including a list of aliases and the devices they are aliased to. On my
IXP150 Pundit-R, the aliases 'iec958' and 'spdif' relate to my digital
output.
3) On my system, there are3 SPDIF controls, one called 'IEC958' which
needed to be turned on (i.e. not muted), one with a slider which
needed to be at maximum 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA', and finally
'IEC958 Playback Source' which needed to be set to 'AC-Link'.

I warmly suggested you look at the detailed HOWTO
(http://mythtv.info/moin.cgi/DigitalSoundHowTo) and create a tailored
asoundrc file for your particular setup. It offers a lot of
flexibility, and once in place, allows you to easily switch between
audio configurations.

Please also post your current ~/.asound.rc, and aplay -l/-L output so
that we might take a look at it.

HTH,
Nick


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