[gerner]

Hello folks,

I'm in the ubuntu sound configuration cloud of confusion and hoping someone may be able to help. I'm trying to get my new 5.1 / 7.1 system set up with pulseaudio.

Problems
1. I can't get pulseaudio to get my channel mappings right.
2. Playing a DVD the sound device failed to initialise - works fine for ac3 - some sort of passthrough vs decoding to pcm issue?

Hardware:
I've just bought a Yamaha YSP-2200 soundbar AV receiver and am trying to get it working with XBMC over HDMI.
I'm using a first gen ION board, alsamixer tells me my sound hardware is a Nvidia MCP79/7A HDMI.

Attempted solution

Following wiki instructions has got me so far. ALSA has my 5.1 channel mappings all sorted correctly using this ~/.asoundrc

Code:

pcm.!default {
        type plug
        slave.pcm hdmi-remap
}

pcm.hdmi-remap {
        type route
        slave.pcm hdmi
        ttable.0.0 1
        ttable.1.1 1
        ttable.2.4 1
        ttable.3.5 1
        ttable.4.2 1
        ttable.5.3 1
        ttable.6.6 1
        ttable.7.7 1
}

If I kill pulseaudio before I start my XBMC session, and configure XBMC to use hdmi-remap and ALSA as the output / passthrough devices, then everything plays nicely, apart from menu sounds.

The problem is if I don't kill pulseaudio then the hdmi-remap device is busy. I did some poking about and discovered pulseaudio had it locked.

Any ideas what direction I should be going in? I'm not sure if I should be trying to 'redirect' pulse audio to use the hdmi-remap device, or if I should just uninstall pulseaudio (notwithstanding menu sounds issue)? Or if there's some other issue at play, e.g. pulseaudio doesn't offer a 7.1 option, which may be causing the channel mapping issue.

TIA for any help.

[DaVu]

I had some sound problems too after a "screenshot-software" installed pulseaudio packages (for what ever).

I had menu sounds but after starting a movie I got the error "unable to intialise sound" or similiar.

apt-get purge pulseaudio

helped for me. So I don´t need menusounds and I can deal with it.

Greetings

[gerner]

Just an update for future googlers.

For the channel mapping issue I found how to remap channels in pulseaudio here: http://confignewton.com/?p=211

From what I can make out it's not possible to use passthrough with pulseaudio with a stock Eden 11 xbmc. Apparently you can purge pulseaudio and use ALSA, but I'm toying with trying a nightly build. I may just leave as is for now and ignore the passthrough - still not sure how much I'll benefit from passthrough.