Bug 57412

Summary:	Pulseaudio under enumerates HDMI interfaces via ALSA
Product:	PulseAudio	Reporter:	abeeson
Component:	alsa	Assignee:	pulseaudio-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	pulseaudio-bugs
Severity:	critical
Priority:	high	CC:	abeeson, diwic, lennart
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description abeeson 2012-11-22 14:45:20 UTC

Pulseaudio is automatically discovering the HDMI output on my devices but is failing to create devices for all the outputs. (this has happened on multiple devices with HDMI outputs, both Nvidia and intel i have seen it on + i have heard reports of it happening on ATI devices as well) 

It selects the first device on the card, does everything correctly, however this is not the live output for the device. The remaining devices on the card are never added and fail to ever be detected. All attempts to manually add the device result in bitstreaming not working.

See the following mailing list conversation from a staff member at Nvidia around this issue:
http://www.mail-archive.com/pulseaudio-discuss@mail.0pointer.de/msg07447.html

As well as this old bug report on the TRAC which lines up with the problems im having and could probably be closed with this bug report once fixed:
http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/909

Finally, this description / forum post about it all on the XBMC forums as i troubleshoot'ed and finally worked around the issue.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=145971

I have not listed this bug as a blocker, however I feel it maybe should be, with HDMI becoming more and more common and sound via it almost a requirement in most situations its used i would expect this problem is affecting many many people, with pulseaudio such an integral part of most major Linux OS's these days (Fedora which i use being one of them) i would expect its a pretty important one to fix.

Please let me know if you need any information, i believe the above should give enough information but if you require aplay output etc please let me know.

Comment 1 Tanu Kaskinen 2012-11-22 16:41:37 UTC

(In reply to comment #0)
> Pulseaudio is automatically discovering the HDMI output on my devices but is
> failing to create devices for all the outputs. (this has happened on
> multiple devices with HDMI outputs, both Nvidia and intel i have seen it on
> + i have heard reports of it happening on ATI devices as well) 

What version of pulseaudio do you have? There's support for multiple HDMI devices per card since 2.0. If you already have pulseaudio 2.0 or later, you can try copying

/usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/extra-hdmi.conf

to

/usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/default.conf

(backing up default.conf first is a good idea). If this makes things work, then there's something wrong in the vendor detection (only NVidia and Intel are supported currently).

If that doesn't work, please attach the verbose pulseaudio log. Instructions for getting that log: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log

> It selects the first device on the card, does everything correctly, however
> this is not the live output for the device. The remaining devices on the
> card are never added and fail to ever be detected. All attempts to manually
> add the device result in bitstreaming not working.

What do you mean by "bitstreaming"? Judging from the XBMC forum thread, you mean playing back non-PCM (i.e. compressed) audio in a passthrough mode. I'm not sure if pulseaudio supports passthrough with HDMI (I can see there's some code that suggests that it's supported), and I don't know if XBMC supports passthrough with pulseaudio at all (I'm not an XBMC user and I don't have hardware for testing it anyway).

> See the following mailing list conversation from a staff member at Nvidia
> around this issue:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/pulseaudio-discuss@mail.0pointer.de/msg07447.html
> 
> As well as this old bug report on the TRAC which lines up with the problems
> im having and could probably be closed with this bug report once fixed:
> http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/909

That bug should be fixed in 2.0. The web server is giving me "500 Internal Server Error" when trying to log in, so I can't close that ticket right now...

Comment 2 abeeson 2012-11-23 10:06:48 UTC

OK that might fix it, im running the latest package in the fedora repo, which is v1.1

I will try compiling and using 2.0+ and see how it goes :)

Comment 3 abeeson 2012-11-23 11:15:27 UTC

OK i have installed pulseaudio 2.99.2 and i seem to be getting all the channels now, however im still seeing the ALSA interfaces as well, and pavucontrol is giving a connection refused while connecting.

Has something major changed between 1.1 and 2.99.2 taht would be causing pavucontrol (which i assume has been built for 1.1) to not connect to pulseaudio?

pacmd works btw :)

Comment 4 Tanu Kaskinen 2012-11-23 11:20:48 UTC

Did you run "sudo ldconfig" after installing?

Comment 5 Arun Raghavan 2013-11-22 10:01:11 UTC

Please reopen with the requested information.

Comment 6 David Henningsson 2014-09-01 07:02:49 UTC

I believe this has been fixed in Git head by Alexander's recent patch set to include 8 HDMI interfaces for everyone. Feel free to reopen if this incorrect.

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