[OmniBlade]

I'm having problems getting surround sound to be passed through HDMI. My setup is I have the HDMI connected to my TV and then an optical cable from my TV to my amp. The amp is an old surround sound system that only takes coax/optical inputs. The XBMC version is 12.2 installed from the Team-XBMC PPA on XBMCbuntu updated to 13.04 though I've had the same problem with earlier versions of XBMCbuntu.

Surround sound is correctly passed through to the TV and then on to the amp when a DVD or Blu-Ray is played from my PS3. It also works if I ssh into the system running XBMC and use iecset to manually set the interface to none audio mode before playing a movie. I cannot get it to automatically change to data mode though. I've tried making several EDID overrides that append DTS and AC3 to the capabilities reported by the TV as well as the speaker layout without success.

I've made a debug log which can be found at http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=46413

Audio is configured in XBMC as follows:

Audio Output - HDMI
Speaker Config - 5.1
Boost on downmix - Yes
Output stereo to all - No
Dolby Digital - Yes
DTS - Yes
AAC - No
Multichannel LPCM - No
TrueHD - No
DTS-HD - No
Audio Output - HDA NVidia, HDMI
Passthrough - HDA NVidia, HDMI

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[TRaSH]

why not connect the optical from your HTPC directly to your amp ?

[OmniBlade]

It means I have to keep switching the optical cable to it whenever I want to use the ps3 or anything else that outputs audio to the TV. Its what I have been doing but I'd rather everything go through the one cable if I can get it working.

[nickr]

Can you set iecset to run when xbmc starts. Also what options do you have for passthrough device?

[OmniBlade]

I can, but if I do that it breaks normal 2 channel sound instead so I would need to toggle it back again. I could run a script to toggle it from something like advanced launcher, but if someone forgets to toggle it they get the a nice shock when instead of the normal sound track they get loud static blasting at them. Not great for the WAF. The GPU is a built in Geforce 8200 if it helps any, roughly equivalent to the ion but for low power AMD systems. This one is in one of the emachines 1401 systems that were going cheap in the UK a few years ago.

[nickr]

What options do you have for passthrough device in xbmc?

[OmniBlade]

The HDMI one I posted above and one for the optical out.

[gazz]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3-Way-Optical-...1c3485ffcd

Get yourself one of these, cheap fix and allows you to connect 3 optical devices to one input.

I have the same one and it works perfectly.