Hi,
I moved to softdevice recently (having HD-TV in mind) and am not using the SPDIF out of my FF card any more. I'd rather use the ALSA SPDIF out like softdevice:
-P softdevice -ao alsa:pcm=plug:spdif#ac3=plug:spdif# -vo dfb:
Works like a charm. (Via VT8235 on an Asus A7V8X board w/ the coax breakout)
Just MP3 gives me the bumps. I can either output via the FF card's SPDIF or via OSS which does not support SPDIF. I don't want to switch inputs on my DD receiver either. I also don't want to send analog data to the DD receiver which in turn re-samples the audio to digital. MP3 should really support ALSA.
I patched mp3-0.9.something a while ago to write the decoded audio into an arbitrary executable via a pipe. This program can then simply "aplay -D plug:spdif" the audio stream. Works fine. This patch was never accepted by the mp3 developers, though, and no work for ALSA was being done.
Has anybody been there, done that?
We had that discussion 2 years ago already http://www.linuxtv.org/mailinglists/vdr/2003/11-2003/msg00792.html
Duh.