2013-03-27, 21:24
First of all, I want to say how pleasantly shocked I was that XBMC basically worked out-of-the-box on my Macbook Air, with only about a half hour of tweaking and installing other software (SwitchResX) to get 23.976fps output to my TV. I shouldn't be shocked because you guys have done such a bang-up job with Frodo on Linux, but I figured OS X support would be immature. Shows me!
Anyway, the only problem I've encountered isn't really that big a deal because it doesn't come up that often, but I thought I would mention it. Typical usage of XBMC on OS X for me would be to hook the MBA up to my receiver, fire up XBMC, and play media through the home theater. As such, I have passthrough (AC3, DTS) on in the XBMC config. What I noticed was that if I try to play a video when it is *not* connected to the receiver, the internal speakers on the MBA play static, suggesting that XBMC is playing the digital audio stream in passthrough mode despite the fact that there is no digital connection to anything that can interpret it.
Should the audio engine should be able to figure out that the machine is playing audio exclusively to analog speakers and automatically disable passthrough? Or, should OS X should be able to deal with (and presumably downmix) a passthrough stream when there's no digital output? I can certainly imagine some ugly border cases, such as playing the audio stream to both the analog speakers *and* digital output, in which case I imagine we would want to downmix to stereo PCM to avoid any outputs receiving static, or send passthrough to the digital device and downmixed PCM to the analog device... yeah, this all feels ugly.
Any thoughts?
Anyway, the only problem I've encountered isn't really that big a deal because it doesn't come up that often, but I thought I would mention it. Typical usage of XBMC on OS X for me would be to hook the MBA up to my receiver, fire up XBMC, and play media through the home theater. As such, I have passthrough (AC3, DTS) on in the XBMC config. What I noticed was that if I try to play a video when it is *not* connected to the receiver, the internal speakers on the MBA play static, suggesting that XBMC is playing the digital audio stream in passthrough mode despite the fact that there is no digital connection to anything that can interpret it.
Should the audio engine should be able to figure out that the machine is playing audio exclusively to analog speakers and automatically disable passthrough? Or, should OS X should be able to deal with (and presumably downmix) a passthrough stream when there's no digital output? I can certainly imagine some ugly border cases, such as playing the audio stream to both the analog speakers *and* digital output, in which case I imagine we would want to downmix to stereo PCM to avoid any outputs receiving static, or send passthrough to the digital device and downmixed PCM to the analog device... yeah, this all feels ugly.
Any thoughts?
- but this is planned for linux afaik.
