On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett(a)verizon.net> wrote:
On Monday 09 March 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:
>On Mon, 09 Mar 2009 06:34:32 -0700
>
>Suvayu Ali wrote:
>> Not many have multiple cards, but most do have these multi-stream
>> capable audio hardware. They come in pretty handy if you actually use
>> your desktop as your primary home multimedia device.
>
>Yep. The main reason I always remove pulseaudio is the apparent total
>inability to send already encoded sound (like a DVD soundtrack) to the
>SP/DIF optical output on my motherboard's sound interface. I spent
>weeks decrypting the ALSA gibberish required to get this working,
>then pulseaudio wiped out all the work. If it can do it, then it
>needs a better mixer interface to show how to do it, if it can't do
>it, it needs to be able to before it can replace ALSA for me.
>
>In fact, I suspect what linux needs far more than pulseaudio is a layer
>on top of ALSA that sorts all the hardware specific gibberish ALSA
>names like "IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA" into something more meaningful
>and provides some explanation for why I have 27 "simple" ALSA sound
controls
>when my motherboard has only 7 sound related connectors :-).
+1000!
Although pulseaudio is capable of sending audio to the digitial out
interface it doesn't do any sort of multi-channel audio over digital
(i.e. AC3/DTS, etc). What your are talking about is AC3/DTS
pass-through. If you tell ALSA properly to pass-through AC3 audio
streams then it will completely bypass pulseaudio.
In fact, this is what I do on my MythTV box which coexists happily
with pulseaudio. How you get pass-through working is unfortunately
something you have to do on a program by program basis. If you list
which specific applications you're having trouble with then there is
probably someone on the list that can help you.
Richard