[alsa-devel] ALSA Multichannel through HDMI

[John Ettedgui]

On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Anssi Hannula <anssi.hannula at iki.fi> wrote:
> On 25.11.2010 14:21, John Ettedgui wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 3:40 AM, Anssi Hannula <anssi.hannula at iki.fi> wrote:
>>> On 25.11.2010 13:09, John Ettedgui wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 2:49 AM, Anssi Hannula <anssi.hannula at iki.fi> wrote:
>>>>> On 25.11.2010 06:12, John Ettedgui wrote:
>>>>>> I'm actually trying to get a 5.1 setup working without passthrough, if
>>>>>> I use mplayer with passthrough my receiver behaves just fine, but I am
>>>>>> trying to send the 6 channels from the computer.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I was actually told that the current ALSA driver for radeon's hdmi
>>>>>> does not support more than 2 channels, and that would explain why I'm
>>>>>> getting this behavior. Is that true though?
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> However, strangely your log output seems to show the intel's hdmi parser
>>>>> being used instead:
>>>>>
>>>>>> ALSA sound/pci/hda/patch_intelhdmi.c:842: hdmi_setup_stream: NID=0x2,
>>>>>> stream=0x1, new-format=0x11
>>>>>
>>>>> Were you just trying some patch at the time?
>>>>
>>>> yes Wu gave me a patch to try against the kernel, I'm guessing this is
>>>> the reason you see something unexpected.
>>>
>>> Did 6 channels work with that patch? (possibly with a wrong channel order)
>> Not any better as far as I remember.
>
> OK. Did 2 channel audio continue to work with it?
>
> If you are not sure, here's the patch doing the same thing against
> current alsa driver:
> http://stuff.onse.fi/0001-ALSA-hda-Use-generic-HDMI-code-for-ATI-HDMI-codecs.patch
>
> Confirming that would help (it would allow to switch the ATI chip to use
> the generic parser instead of the ATI-specific one), though not with the
> multichannel issue (see below).
>
> [...]
>
>>>> Since I just moved to jack/rca cables I'm in no hurry anymore, but is
>>>> there any reason why the driver cannot work with more than 2 channels?
>>>
>>> I don't really know (it is simply not implemented).
>> Alright.
>>>
>>>> Anything I could do to help with that?
>>>
>>> Possibly. But see above, so that we won't try the same things you
>>> already tried :)
>>>
>> Sure :)
>
> Looking again at the the alsa info output you provided, I don't think I
> have any great ideas. It looks like the chip simply reports that it
> supports a maximum of 2 channels.
>
> One option could be hardcoding "chans = 8;" in generic_hdmi_build_pcms()
> in sound/pci/hda/patch_hdmi.c (assuming you have the above patch and 2
> channel audio works with it). However, I find it rather unlikely that it
> would make any difference.
>
> --
> Anssi Hannula
>

Anssi,
the patch fails on my kernel, I cannot find the hda_codec_preset
manually in there either.
Did you want me to try that against a 2.6.37 rc instead of a 2.6.36?

Thanks,
John