On Sun, 06 Jul 2008 10:16:39 -0400 William Case <billlinux@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 3) My project for the next while is to work out how various multimedia > work. I'd tackle something simpler if I were you, like maybe quantum theory or ending war. All I know is that the only tool that (so far) has worked on absolutely everything is 32 bit mplayer with every Windows codec I could find on the web stashed in /usr/lib/codecs/ (it works on an awful lot of stuff without the Windows codecs, but that last 10% need them). The part that goes really haywire is interfacing to audio. You'd think it might be simple to say "Hey, play this DVD and send the dolby sound bitstream out the optical SP/DIF interface.", but 6 weeks of web searches were needed for me to find the totally obvious (that's sarcasm :-) command sequence I needed: amixer set IEC958 unmute amixer set 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA' 0 amixer set 'IEC958 Playback Source' PCM mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 -ac hwdts,hwac3, Naturally, those obvious commands only work for my specific hardware given the specific device numbers allocated by the kernel, etc. Naturally, fedora 9 has changed audio so much that I haven't been able to discover how to make any of this work there (heck, maybe it is even simpler, but the last thing any linux developers ever do is provide documentation :-) And, of course, that only works for something like a DVD that has an already encoded bitstream available. To get my plain old mp3s to play out the SP/DIF port, I'd apparently have to become an international pirate and build my own version of alsa with support for illegal plugins to do PCM encoding :-). -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list