[alsa-devel] ALSA Multichannel through HDMI

[Anssi Hannula]

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