At Mon, 02 Jul 2007 19:17:35 -0700, gt bradley wrote:
Hi, I've been beating my had against this for several weeks now. (started with fedora 6, tried adding in the plugings etc (version 1.0.12) -- also tried upgrading to the current 1.0.14 version, without success (couldn't produce surround-sound on teh spdif output). I have now switched to fedorea 7 and was able to have rythmbox play surround sound via spdif, but have since lost that ability. (but I'm convinced the hardware and low-level drivers support it). In order to limit the number of moving parts, I have reduced to just trying to get speaker-test to play on all 6 speakers.
SPDIF is basically only for a two-channel PCM stream. For 5.1 outputs, you'll have to encode the raw multi-channel PCM to some compressed format such as AC3 or DTS and embed in SPDIF frames. And, that's not the driver job, so far -- at least the current driver doesn't do any conversion. Thus a software has to do it.
You can try a52 plugin for the on-the-fly encoding, found in alsa-plugins package. The plugin seems working for some apps but for some not yet well, unfortunately...
Takashi