[alsa-devel] HDMI on HDA device=3

[Jaroslav Kysela]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2010, David Henningsson wrote:

> On 2010-11-09 15:58, Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
>> On Tue, 9 Nov 2010, David Henningsson wrote:
>> 
>>> I have seen a few HDMIs which share the HDA controller with the onboard
>>> sound card, but the codecs are different, e g the onboard one is at
>>> address #0 and the HDMI is at address #3 - or even #3, #7, #8 and #9 in
>>> some cases.
>>> 
>>> Now, if the user specifies the device string hdmi:x (where x is card
>>> name/number), I'd like it to kind of autodetect this and use DEV=3
>>> instead of DEV=0, and without breaking the cards where the hdmi is a
>>> separate card with a codec at address #0. However, it still seems like
>>> the device is at DEV=3 somehow.
>>> 
>>> Now, looking at /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf, I notice that
>>> there are entries HDA-Intel.pcm.hdmi.0 which sets DEV=3, so it seems
>>> like someone already thought of this. However, just using "hdmi:x" does
>>> not trigger "DEV=3". I'm still not grepping all of the alsa lisp
>>> architecture stuff, so could someone explain to me how the
>>> HDA-Intel.pcm.hdmi.0 entry relates to the "hdmi:x" alsa device string?
>> 
>> It's not about a lisp (this portion of code is not used at all). It's
>> about the (partly) dynamic alsa-lib configuration.
>
> Ok, thanks for the clarification.
>
>> Use always indexes from 0.. (hdmi:0,0 etc..) Fist number is card number,
>> second number is device number (which is logical device number mapped to
>> different physical device number in case when HDA card contains both
>> analog and HDMI sections).
>> 
>> If you read HDA-Intel.conf, you'll get this device mapping (logical,
>> physical):
>> 
>> 0 -> 3
>> 1 -> 7
>> 2 -> 8
>> 3 -> 9
>> 
>> Perhaps, something does not work correctly?
>
> Hmm, this is a little confusing. Do all these mean the same thing, and do 
> they all correspond to the logical device number?
>
> hdmi:x,y
> hdmi:CARD=x,y
> hdmi:CARD=x,DEV=y
> hdmi:CARD=x,DEVICE=y
>
> And would hdmi:x and hdmi:x,0 be the same thing?

Yes, if defaults.pcm.iec958.device -> default.pcm.device is 0 (check 
alsa.conf).

> And if all these correspond to the logical device number, is there any way 
> you can specify the physical device number directly in the connect string?

You have to use hw:x,y (or plughw:x,y) device. The purpose of hdmi device 
name is that you want the hdmi output and index the devices in some 
logical way. It's something like 'default', 'front', 'surround*', 
'iec958' devices.

 						Jaroslav

-----
Jaroslav Kysela <perex at perex.cz>
Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
ALSA Project, Red Hat, Inc.