Bug#660111: more info
retitle 660111 [linux-image-3.2] ALC269VB HDMI single physical port ->
multiple devices detected
quit
After some online searching for this card's codec alc269vb I found
several reports (some very old...) of the problem in Arch Linux:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=133222
They point to a solution which is no longer documented. However, I did
some more digging around and found a workaround:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/gpu-hdmi-audio-document/gpu-hdmi-audio.html#_pulseaudio_default_device
or
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Setup_HDMI_audio_on_GeForce_GT210,_GT220,_or_GT240#PulseAudio_Configuration
or
http://www.mail-archive.com/pulseaudio-discuss@mail.0pointer.de/msg07433.html
However, all these discussions point to NVIDIA cards, which are known
for having several HDMI ports available. My laptop only has one, which
in case of the 3.0.x kernel was assigned to the default HDMI alsa
device #3 (and pulseaudio had no trouble using it). Now with kernel
3.2.x, my card appears to have 3 HDMI ports. The one on device #3 is
no longer the actual connector on the laptop, but device #7 is,
however pulseaudio only loads the first device by default.
The workaround, as listed in the 3 links provided, is to force pulse
to load the device that actually works adding this line to
/etc/pulse/default.pa
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,7
This works, I have just tested it. But I don't understand why my
device, having only one physical output can be detected as having
three, this is why I think the bug report should remain open.
Furthermore this workaround hinders me from manually choosing the
output device on pavucontrol as I did before, thus I cannot use the
laptop speakers..
Should a bug report be filed against pulseaudio for lacking the
capability to handle several HDMI outputs? I'm of the opinion that
this is not necessary seeing as they are already aware of the problem.
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