On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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 -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
