Kodi Community Forum

I am currently running xbmc 10.1-0.4 (packages from debian-multimedia.org) on Debian testing (wheezy) on a nvidia ion 2 based system with atom processor (i686) and attached a screen with included speakers using HDMI. Now, once I start the system, it boots and automatically starts xbmc and is (theoretically ready to use).

When I try to play a file, sound isn't working. The only way I can get it to work is to open an addon like "Mediathek", play a wmv or flv-Stream. This action seems to trigger something since from this point on, sound over hdmi just works fine for all files.

I am currently running kernel 2.6.39 which includes the latest ALSA drivers (1.0.24). This behaviour ist really strange, did any of you encounter similiar problems and do you have an idea how to solve this so sound works right from the start?

Can I assume that you have read the countless other posts on this forum dealing with no hdmi audio and that you have run alsamixer and un-muted your digital outputs?

If not press ctl+alt+f2 to get to a tty.

login and run sudo alsamixer

tab over to all spdif outputs and press m to unmute them.

Reboot and resume setting the correct output for audio in the gui.

Opening the .asoundrc in the home directory will give you hints as to a custom output if no others work. For a two channel setup on hdmi I ended up running pcm.hdmi_formatted on custom passthrough device and hdmi on custom on the audio output device as custom.

Hope it helps
quotaholic

Thanks for your suggestion. I indeed read at least many of the threads exisiting about that topic two months ago but didn't find a working solution for me. In alsamixer S/PDIF was indeed muted (while S/PDIF Default wasn't) so I unmuted it and rebooted but it didn't change anything.

I also checked if there's any difference in alsamixer settings between the working and non-working state but there isn't any.

The thing I don't understand here is why would audio output work when playing an wmv-stream from some site but not when playing a local XVid or h264 file (unless the wmv-stream has been played first)? It doesn't seem to me like the typical hdmi sound-problem but I have no idea where the problem could be.