Hi there,
well, I haven't used softdevice anymore for a long time, because I had some strange video issues (only black screen with OSD, no video), and after I decided to start with a fresh new system on my VDR machine, now I'm giving vdr-1.7.7 a try, with the plugins that work already with it, softdevice being one of them. I tried this with softdevice-0.5.0.20090218 (as packaged in gentoo) and CVS, and my problem is that my external amplifier hooked up via optical SPDIF detects no signal when switching to AC3 audio tracks of channels or recordings. This works however when playing a video file with an AC3 track in fbxine for example. I mostly copied over the settings from my old system, where even this ac3 passtrhrough with softdevice used to work. Here are some settings and outputs that might be relevant:
In /etc/vdr/setup.conf, I have: CurrentDolby = 1 DolbyTransferFix = 0 # don't know what this does, there is no difference UseDolbyDigital = 1 UseDolbyInRecordings = 1 softdevice.AC3Mode = 1 # should be passthrough, right?
'aplay -l' shows: **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: CMI8738 [C-Media CMI8738], device 0: CMI8738-MC6 [C-Media PCI DAC/ADC] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: CMI8738 [C-Media CMI8738], device 1: CMI8738-MC6 [C-Media PCI 2nd DAC] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: CMI8738 [C-Media CMI8738], device 2: CMI8738-MC6 [C-Media PCI IEC958] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
'aplay -L' shows: front:CARD=CMI8738,DEV=0 C-Media CMI8738, C-Media PCI DAC/ADC Front speakers rear:CARD=CMI8738,DEV=0 C-Media CMI8738, C-Media PCI 2nd DAC Rear speakers surround40:CARD=CMI8738,DEV=0 C-Media CMI8738, C-Media PCI 2nd DAC 4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers surround41:CARD=CMI8738,DEV=0 C-Media CMI8738, C-Media PCI 2nd DAC 4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers surround50:CARD=CMI8738,DEV=0 C-Media CMI8738, C-Media PCI 2nd DAC 5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers surround51:CARD=CMI8738,DEV=0 C-Media CMI8738, C-Media PCI 2nd DAC 5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers iec958:CARD=CMI8738,DEV=0 C-Media CMI8738, C-Media PCI DAC/ADC IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output null Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
And the most important, the parameters given to the softdevice plugin: '--plugin=softdevice -vo dfb:mgatv -ao alsa:pcm=default#ac3=hw:0,2#'
I have to mention that normal mpeg audio is decoded and sent as PCM to the SPDIF, only AC3 and only with vdr softdevice is the problem. I tried hw:0,0 and hw:0,1 as well, but no sound. How to deal with this, did I miss something?
Lucian