2009-12-26, 02:44
I had a bugger of a conundrum last night with my freshly upgraded Ubuntu to 9.10 Karmic Koala. Everything was working wonderfully (especially the full support built-in for my iMon Pad remote)... except that I couldn't get any surround sound to work.
I was previously using my onboard optical output with IEC958 to do AC3 Passthru on loads of movies. All of my settings looked correct, but still, it was a no-go.
Did some research and discovered that Pulseaudio (default in 9.10) doesn't support any form of AC3 passthru/surround/5.1/what-have-you.
I tried a lot of manual settings to have XBMC fallback and use ALSA instead of even trying to hook into Pulse, but apparently Pulse is too hard-wired throughout the system to just override it like that.
The Solution
Remove pulseaudio. (Seriously, just use ALSA instead)
Done.
I was previously using my onboard optical output with IEC958 to do AC3 Passthru on loads of movies. All of my settings looked correct, but still, it was a no-go.
Did some research and discovered that Pulseaudio (default in 9.10) doesn't support any form of AC3 passthru/surround/5.1/what-have-you.
I tried a lot of manual settings to have XBMC fallback and use ALSA instead of even trying to hook into Pulse, but apparently Pulse is too hard-wired throughout the system to just override it like that.
The Solution
Remove pulseaudio. (Seriously, just use ALSA instead)
Code:
sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio
Done.