[lloydsmart]

Hi all.

There's already a thread on this at the Ubuntu forums, which I'd like to bring to the table here to see if anyone from the XBMC side has a solution to it?

Here's the thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1304614

Basically, I can get bitstreaming to work, but only at the expense of the non-bitstreamed formats! i.e. If I want to bitstream DTS or AC3, that's fine, but I have to disable support for plain old MP3, FLAC, AAC, etc.

Have a look at the other thread and let me know what you think!

P.S. My hardware is: ASUS M3N78-PRO motherboard, which includes the Nvidia 8300 chip. This provides onboard graphics and DxVA/VDPAU for H264, VC1 and MPEG-2, up to 1080p. It also supports bitstreaming AC3 and DTS over the onboard HDMI, aswell as up to 7.1 LPCM over the same HDMI.

[lloydsmart]

Hmm... someone in the thread over at UbuntuForums suggested running the command:

Code:

pasuspender xbmc

But when I do all I get is a crash (freeze) when I try to play any video. Does anyone know how this works? Maybe I need to compile a version of xbmc with pulseaudio support disabled for that command to have its desired affect? Or is there something else I should be doing? Any help appreciated.

[lloydsmart]

Ok, I've still not got this working so I wanted to ask a few specific questions about things I might try to achieve this.

From what I understand, there's no actual need to use PulseAudio for XBMC, as generally, you don't need sound mixing when the only thing running is XBMC. So, the suggestion to use pasuspender seems logical - disable pulse while XBMC is running. Great.

That leaves us with the situation of getting XBMC to communicate directly with ALSA to try to get sound output. The goal here is that AC3/DTS bitstreaming will work (over HDMI in my case), but also that the "normal" sountracks will also play by conversion to LPCM, which is also sent over HDMI.

What I want to know is, how come XBMC crashes when I try to play something if I've used pasuspender? Is there something in XBMC I should reconfigure to help it deal with ALSA directly? Or should I compile a version without pulseaudio support? Is that even possible, and would it make any difference?

Please guys, all I'm trying to do here is achieve a situation where I can launch XBMC, on my Karmic installation, and play everything without having to tinker with settings each time. Is that too much to ask?

Thanks for any help.

[lloydsmart]

bump? please?

EDIT:
OK, this is now solved so I thought I'd link to the solution here.

The thread where I got the answer actually just links me over to yet another thread, so I'll link both.

http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=62549
Where F3d0r kindly linked to his solution, here:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=62165

Just to recap, the solution is to manually specify the hardware device you want to play in XBMC, e.g. I had to put plughw:0,3 for my sound in both "normal" and "bitstream" output sections.

Thanks go to F3d0r for this solution, but also thanks to everyone who posted suggestions and helped out.