pulseaudio deeply unreliable (Fedora 10)

Richard Shaw hobbes1069 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 9 17:04:46 UTC 2009


On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at 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




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