[evilspoons]

Hi everyone.

I have a PC with a Gigabyte mainboard that has the Geforce 9300 chipset. Connection to my home theatre is via HDMI to my TV and a coax digital cable to my amplifier.

I was running Ubuntu 9.04 with the latest XBMC no problems, sound-wise.

I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04.1 on a new hard drive. I installed and started XBMC and duplicated my old audio settings into the new copy of XBMC.

Now, whenever I start playing a file I get "blah blah could not initialize audio device, check your settings" in a pop-up window. However, if I open the audio properties (the speaker button while the video is playing) and switch to analog, I get a signal that works (but is 2.0 stereo downmixed). I then switch BACK to digital and I get a fully working 5.1 passthrough signal!

This is the same problem as this guy. Unfortunately he solved his problem by switching to Windows.

I have to do this every stinkin' time I start playing a new video file. It's extraordinarily aggravating.

I tried the .asoundrc thing mentioned on the FAQ but that did not help.

My aplay -l output is as follows:

Code:

erik@chromebox:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

My audio settings are:
Output: digital
AC3 capable receiver ON
DTS capable receiver ON
Audio output device: custom
Custom audio device: iec958
Passthrough output device: iec958
Downmix multichannel audio to stereo OFF

Now here's the pain in the ass part. I have also installed Boxee. Boxee WORKS PERFECTLY! The settings are identical except the devices for Audio and Passthrough are "iec958:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0". I tried putting this into XBMC as a custom device but it didn't work.

Help please! I'm tearing my hair out. Thanks.

[homer79]

Have you tried going to alsamixer and manually turning on the digital output. I have to to this with a fresh install of Xbmcfreak LiveCD 10.08. I've got a gt210 and a cmedia sound card with optical output.

[evilspoons]

FWIW I can make sound come out of the speakers using Ubuntu directly - via only the SPDIF cable.

I checked alsamixer, "SPDIF" and "SPDIF Default PCM" were unmuted. "SPDIF 1" was muted but unmuting it made no difference.

I have noticed that while Boxee plays videos with sound with no issue that the second you start Boxee it pops up the same error message that XBMC is giving. The message is in the top left of the screen on top of the Boxee welcome page. It goes away almost immediately, however.