I am using xbmc pre-11 fully up to date on Linux Mint 11(64-bit). I have a few videos with dolby digital as the audio stream. This is also a problem for any DVD's I try to play in XBMC with dolby(which is pretty much all of them.) They play just fine in Totem Movie Player, but not in XBMC, it gives me the error, "Cannot play audio stream, check your audio settings." I also have a laptop,(also linux mint 11 64-bit with xbmc pre-11) that I hook up to my bedroom tv that plays these same files just fine. I have checked the audio settings in XBMC and made sure Dolby passthrough to my receiver is active(I use an optical out of my IEC958 built in motherboard for output.) Any thought on what would cause this? Pulseaudio? A setting I have overlooked in XBMC?
I'm going through almost exactly the same heartache as you are, though I'm trying to have it pass through the audio via HDMI instead of Optical! Have been messing about with Pulse Audio, though to be honest, I don't really know what I'm doing with it! XBMC plays all of my videos absolutely fine, but I get no sound on AC3 (Dolby Digital) videos.
I'm using:
Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) 64-bit
XBMC Dev Unstable PPA (Natty )
Nvidia GT 430 Graphics card (HDMI)
I am almost at the point of wiping the hard drive, installing Ubuntu 10 on there and sticking with more stable drivers for everything, but I can't help but think that there's a solution out there already..
@
Stevie
My laptop mentioned above that DOES work with dolby, is passing it through HDMI no problem. It's a built in intel motherboard one. As I understand, if you have Nvidia, it's notorious for not working 100% on the audio side.
Ah ok.
I'm guessing it's the NVidia part then that is giving me the issues then. I did find last night that if I set the XBMC Audio Settings to disable AC3 passthrough, i now get sound on those videos, which is good. On my amp it says 'PCM Multi Channel' so not Dolby Digital, but it will do for now.
Thanks Steve. Disabling ac3 passthrough got me audio. 5.1 is a difficult thing to pass from linux. The audio layers are so f'd up, alsa, pulseaudio, oss. I'm an audio engineer that uses linux extensively for recording and mixing, and I don't fully understand the mess that has been created. If the general linux audio system moved just to JACK and alsa, we might be better off
Did you guys ever get to a real resolution on this? I get a machine gun like sound if I have Dolby enabled & play an HD video running on Ubuntu.
I struggled with the same problem for quite some time. I ended up setting both audio settings to Alsa
pdif and then disabled the appearance setting that is for sounds in the ui. Once I disabled the sounds in the ui section it stopped using pulse audio and I was able to properly hear everything through Alsa. I have no ui sounds but everything else works as expected.