Dark Liquid

This is why I love Linux. When you have a problem, research and perseverance will get you through. You aren’t stuck because everything is some stupid proprietary driver or because the various subsystems of your OS don’t provide any logging or configuration.

Today, Lostprocess and I upgraded my mediabox to OpenSUSE 11.1. Installing the fglrx drivers was a bit of an arse but eventually we got it working. Then, we decided to try to setup the HDMI.

Now, I’ve always had a problem with this. I have an Asus P2A something or other which has a M2R68L motherboard. It’s always had some issue or other with it and has never worked properly.

Getting the video to work was easy enough, but the sound was fucked. Nothing would come through.

Eventually we solved it.

First of all we set some module options, like so:

options snd-hda-intel mode=6stack-dig,6stack-dig

But restarting the module with the new settings didn’t help. Eventually it came to light that the problem was to do with pulseaudio.

Pulseaudio was auto-detecting only some of the cards and refusing to send data to the HDMI output. We disabled the hardware auto-detection and forced it to setup the HDMI output as it’s sole audio sink. That sorted it and we were hearing audio via the HDMI! Woohoo!

Basically we commented out the load-module module-hal-detect and module-detect lines and then added a new line something like: load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,3

That sorted it out. There is probably a better way to set the default audio sink of pulseaudio, but I don’t know what it is so disabling every sink except the one I want works out too. Lostprocess actually found the pulseaudio lines required to hack this up, so kudos to him.

VLC seems to have issues with pulse audio or something. Playback with VLC was really juddery consistently but Totem (and anything using gstreamer as well) seems to playback everything fine. Even 720p stuff plays quite nicely (my TV is a 1080i but 720p plays better on it really) which is something that’s always been crappy before.

Overall I’m rather pleased, both with OpenSUSE 11.1 (which is miles better than 10.3 which I had upgraded from – no more waiting for ever for bloody zypper to update the repo caches!) and with the nice, shiny HDMI output. Ohhhhh yeeeeaaaahh!