yes, I am aware that AC3 is required, I'm trying to get the AC3 pass-through configured. From your response, I understand now that speaker-test is performing as expected, however I have tired other things also: I have some AC3 encoded test files, and I have also tried installing ffmpeg, and liba52. and the ac3dec utility which I understand should pass through the AC3/DTS encoded files, but I recieve:
[root@ps3 Surround-SDL-testfiles]# ac3dec -C dolby-canyon.ogg Using PCM device 'plug:iec958:{AES0 0x2 AES1 0x82 AES2 0x0 AES3 0x2}' ALSA lib conf.c:3939:(snd_config_expand) Unknown parameters {AES0 0x2 AES1 0x82 AES2 0x0 AES3 0x2} ALSA lib pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM iec958:{AES0 0x2 AES1 0x82 AES2 0x0 AES3 0x2} snd_pcm_open: Invalid argument Output open failed
However if I am planning to write ac3 to the linux driver, are you saying that I would be better to write directly to the driver rather than through the ALSA layer?
thanks GT
Takashi Iwai wrote:
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