[OpenIndiana-discuss] Unable to get sound | HDMI passthrough ATI

[Rthoreau]

Guy Woolley <guy.woolley at btinternet.com> writes:

>  Hello again,
<snip>
> $ls /dev/sound
>
> shows
>
> 0     1     audiohd:0      audiohd:0dsp      audiohd:1    audiohd:1dsp
> 0ctl  1ctl  audiohd:0ctl  audiohd:0mixer  audiohd:1ctl    audiohd:1mixer
>
> and you presumably will have the same. You have to decide whether "0"
> or "1" refers to the device connected to your hdmi.
> to set the keys for audiosink,chataudiosink and musicaudiosink to
>
> oss4sink device = "/dev/sound/audiohd:0dsp"
>
> (assuming audiohd0 is the correct choice).
>
> You may also have to fix /dev/audio and /dev/audioctl, something like
> (as root)
>
> #ln -s /dev/sound/audiohd:0ctl  /dev/audioctl
> #ln -s /dev/sound/audiohd:0 /dev/audio
>
> These moves got my audio sorted out. I've no experience with HDMI and
> assume you know your HDMI  connection is good.
>
> Hope something here helps.

You might want to look at this thread and depending on your card chip-set
support I probably would not count on HDMI or spdif support any time
soon .  

http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=127614&tstart=0

I am in the same situation but with spdif instead of HDMI as of right at
this moment have a 2.0 system hooked up with spdif to my on-board optical
output.  But in order to get sound I need an analog cable and I had to
purchase a different cheaper sound card as well as a cheap two speaker
system just to get sound working.  It was a pain a few years ago as I then had a full 7.1 surround sound system in my computer room using
this very setup.

I know a few people who would love to have spdif and HDMI work as it
would make a killer htpc file server. I can see the benefit of using ZFS
while having the ability of passing the audio to a proper AVR for
processing.

As far as HDMI support you might be able to get it if you purchase a
Nvidia supported card.  But the support would be in the drivers and
depending on what Nvidia has chosen to support.  For example you might
not get any HD audio support but only PCM pass-through.

I would not feel too bad though as you follow the people on the AVS
forums getting HDMI to work on Windows systems with full HD audio can be
tricky as well.

For example the default sound support device in OpenIndiana goes to my Radeon
4850 graphics card, and you literally have to change the device support
in a few files to get it working. I have posted the thread below if you
find having default device problems.

http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=465904

So hopefully in the future we can get some of these sound issues ironed
out as I think it would be very useful to a lot of people.

Rthoreau