[linux-dvb] Re: Still unhappy: SBLive! + ac3dec/play-ac3 ...

[Stephan Schreiber <stephan@sschreiber.de>]

Jens,

with my "SB Live Player 1024", which is 18 months old now, it works ONLY 
with ALSA.
I was not able to get SPDIF working with the creative driver.
The ac3dec tool is located in the tools/ directory of the ALSA CVS tree.
You have to build it separately and put it in /usr/local/bin.
Use it with option -C.
One other thing is that you have to tell the driver what inputs and outputs 
you have.
You find the related information in the INSTALL file.
I am using the following lines in /etc/modules.conf:

# ALSA native device support
alias char-major-116 snd
options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=1
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-emu10k1
options snd-card-emu10k1 snd_index=0 snd_id="SBLive" snd_extin=0x000f 
snd_extout=0x1f0f

BTW: There is no checkbox to enable digital sound, and you won't need one.
The driver seems to use SPDIF really natively, without converting 
everything to analogue first, passing it through the mixer and redigitizing 
it as the Windows driver obviously does. So you will not be able to change 
the volume or anything else.
Sound comes out of the SPDIF just "as is", which is very good if you are 
using an external amplifier.

One problem remains: When watching video with ac3 in dvdplayer, the sound 
seems to be delayed, barely noticeable, but enough to make me switch to 
Prologic. What can be done about this lag? Anyone here got a solution?

Cheers
Stephan



At 10:58 17.07.2001 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>my problem still exists sending digital sound to an external dd receiver.
>Following is a summary of all testing:
>
>Using ALSA drivers I can't find a tool for routing digital stream to combo
>jack of SBLive! (orange adapter on back of card). So no dd 5.1 sound gets out
>of this connector.
>
>If I use emu10k1 driver which seems to be patched in some way makes "ac3dec"
>available for splitting sound into stereo channels (using extract_ac3 to pipe
>sound stream to ac3dec). No sound at all on the orange jack.
>Play-ac3 won't work because of error message "open: file or directory does not
>exist!". Both play-ac3 and "test.ac3" (extracted stream do exist). Btw:
>play-ac3 seems to be no solution because you only can give it a file name for
>sound input ... (and: yes, I loaded the patched route for digital out with
>"make load" from the play-ac3 source directory).
>Beside that the README of the emu10k1 driver tells me, that newer models of
>SBLIve with the combo jack for both digital out and analog are not supported.
>Do I have an old driver version?
>
>If I use the ALSA driver "snd-card-emu10k1" and start alsamixer I don't see
>any channel or "checkbox" to enable "digital sound". This is possible within
>So I'm a little confused right now and I think come to a dead end.
>
>Does anyone have a conclusion?
>
>Best regards,
>Jens Hauser
>
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