[Cubox] Surround sound via HDMI – asound.conf suggestion.

[rquastMember]

I had a bit of a challenge getting surround sound working with my Sony HTS. I found a great article that solved my issues with the surround sound: http://www.solid-run.com/mw/index.php/XBMC_April-9_Installer#Sound_over_HDMI.2FSPDIF

One of the problems I had after that was /etc/asound.conf was being overwritten each time I booted by /usr/lib/alsa-utils/alsa-mixer-setup

I understand the point of the alsa-mixer-setup needing to overwrite the config (if you change your connections etc, you may need to reconfigure asound.conf). I ended up commenting out the code that wrote out to asound.conf.

Is there a chance that /etc/audio can have a variable to turn off the automatic overwriting of the config file?

• This topic was modified 1 week, 4 days ago by rquast.

[Warped RudiMember]

Strange. The article you mention is completely outdated. Recent versions of Geexbox should not require any manual fiddling with asound.conf at all. Except one is trying to use something like an USB audio adapter. For the built-in HDMI or SPDIF, selecting/checking the appropiate option in the XBMC GUI (i.e. AC3/DTS capable receiver) should be sufficient. All other settings – including the device names – have meaningful defaults. Note that HD audio formats will not work. Even though the options to enable them are present. What exactly was the problem with your Sony ? I’m testing with a Yamaha here…

[togathMember]

No problem with Audiolab and Kennwood preamps. DD-EX and DTS-ES work fine.

[rquastMember]

Rudi: Surround sound just didn’t work no matter what config I tried in other posts over the place. I tried everything (including the config from my old xbmc box, which didn’t work with the system either). It may have been changing some of the options in xbmc that made it work (as mentioned in the post), or changing the options in asound.conf – I’m not sure what made it work? I have a Sony BDV-N990W. It now works perfectly and the system reports DTS, AC3 etc. I also had a painful time getting it to work on my last xbmc box too, and fiddling with the asound.conf fixed it then.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 3 days ago by rquast.

[Warped RudiMember]

Hmm, to test this I made a fresh SD card from the current build (which only marginally differs from the 3.1 release). Passthrough worked out of the box. I had forgotten: We default to audio output mode “Optical/Coax” with AC3 and DTS enabled. Since (on CuBox) HDMI and SPDIF share the same hardware device, you get HDMI audio output with this setting as well. It just won’t send some advanced formats (EAC3 aka Dolby Digital Plus) as bitstream. The speaker configuration defaults to 2.0 but since multichannel PCM or analog output is not supported anyway, this setting is pretty much useless.

Did you do a fresh install of 3.1 or did you upgrade from an older version ? I’m not 100% convinced that upgrading really works…

[rquastMember]

I am stupid. I found out that the video I was testing for 5.1 was 2.0 at the start of the video and 5.1 a minute into the video. I thought it wasn’t working, so I then tried to get it to output multichannel PCM (unsuccessfully) and then I set it back to passthrough and tried a different 5.1 video. Very sorry to have bothered you with this. Geexbox is really lightweight and great!

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