Marshall's Weblog

Well, today was a looooong day of configuring stuff. I got around to purchasing a wireless keyboard and mouse as well as a S/PDIF cable to connect the DVD drive to the soundcard digitally. I embarked on what I figured would be the most difficult and time consuming part (and what I think was the most important part) of my MythTV journey, configuring the sound. I have a good digital receiver and I wanted DVD’s to play at 5.1 surround or AC3 or DTS, whatever the DVD disc supported. After hours or reading forums and blogs around the net, I came to a point where I thought I had everything configured. So the next thing to do was to attemp to hook the Myth box into the stereo and TV. As soon as I turned it on, I saw the computer POST on my TV. All was going well so far. I started up X and attempted to play a DVD and got no sound, so I went into alsamixer and started messing with some settings until the DVD was playing through my stereo system. Something was still wrong though, I was only getting 2 channel audio. I quick Google search landed me with this command:

mplayer -ac hwac3,hwdts, -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv %s

mplayer was now sending AC3 audio through the pass-through in the sound card and the receiver was chewing it up and spittin out 5.1 glorious channels of dolby digital sound!

All fine and dandy, right? Wrong. I wanted to use xine for DVD playback as it supports DVD Menus and mplayer does not. Another quick Google search (there were countless ones today) and I had a command which would work with xine — except it didn’t. After reading about audio all day, I knew I had to putz around with my xine config and possibly my /etc/asound.conf file. 2 hours later, here is what I came up with:

asound.conf file

pcm.cmipci {
        type hw
        card 0
}

ctl.cmipci {
        type hw
        card 0
}

pcm.!default {
        type plug
        slave { pcm "spdif" }
}

.xine/config

audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through

The xine config file tells it to pass all audio through to the receiver. Now I can launch a DVD using this command:

xine -pfhq --no-splash dvd:/