Kodi Community Forum

I'm brand new to xbmc. I'm trying to get DTS and AC3 passthrough to work
through and optical cable. The cable connects to the S/PDIF header on my
motherboard and to a home-theater receiver. Passthrough works on mplayer
using the options

-ao also -afm hwac3

so I know the hardware is capable of doing the job. However, I tried a number of combinations of settings with XBMC, and either I get straight 2-channel PCM audio with no DTS or Dolby Digital (AC3), or else I get no sound at all and an
error message about xbmc not being able to initialize audio.

The debug log, at http://pastebin.com/BzpJGznG, suggests that the device
is busy. I think pulseaudio may be running, and perhaps xbmc cannot grab
the device for that reason? Not sure.

I am running a stock Ubuntu Maverick with the xbmc PPA added.

Any suggestions?

Close XBMC and please post output of:

Code:
lsof | grep snd

That command will tell you what program is using your audio.

Jerry

Jerry,

Thanks kindly for your help. (Slow reply because this is a weekend project.)
It looks like the pulseaudio daemon has /dev/snd/controlC0 open:

Code:
$ sudo lsof | grep snd

gnome-set 1456         tv  mem       REG        8,3   403948  269419554 /usr/lib/libsndfile.so.1.0.21

pulseaudi 1583         tv  mem       REG        8,3   403948  269419554 /usr/lib/libsndfile.so.1.0.21

pulseaudi 1583         tv   27u      CHR     116,10      0t0       8846 /dev/snd/controlC0

gconf-hel 1713         tv  mem       REG        8,3   403948  269419554 /usr/lib/libsndfile.so.1.0.21

tv@tvdog:~$ ps ax | grep 158[3]

1583 ?        S<l    0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog

A search turns up a blog entry from January 2009 suggesting that problems with XBMC and pulseaudio should be in the past.
But maybe I need to do something?

Norman Ramsey

jawilljr

Norman Ramsey