No HDMI sound in XBMC

**petri** · October 3rd, 2011

I rebooted and now speaker-test -c2 -r 44100 -F S16_LE -D hw:1,9 works but there is no sound.

edit: I haven't changed back to 1.0.23 yet.

**petri** · October 3rd, 2011

Now I have changed back to 1.0.23 and now the speaker icon has disappeared and there is no sound with VLC or the earlier commands on this thread.

**petri** · October 3rd, 2011

Patience is a virtue which I have have less and less for every year. Well I had nothing to lose so I made a clean install and updated it. But I have not installed Nvidia drivers because I am not sure if it is from nvidia.com or Ubuntus drivers I should use. This time I want to do everything right or at least the way somebody who knows more than I do tells me to.

My new wget http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh -O alsa-info.sh && bash alsa-info.sh looks like this: http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=25...381bb08c65199d

Surely a clean install must be easiest to get HDMI sound to?

Commands earlier in this thread doesn't produce any sound.

**petri** · October 3rd, 2011

Installed the newest drivers from nvidia.com and with the posts #3 in this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1668173 I got the sound back in VLC with 5.1 but the video in VLC is too jerky so I want to get the sound to XBMC too. Anyone?

**petri** · October 5th, 2011

and bump

**petri** · October 13th, 2011

Believe it or not but I did it all by myself. Or almost. Now I have sound not only in VLC but Movie Player and XBMC too.
Here's how I did it.

First I removed Nouveau drivers from my fresh installation with help of this which I found from here. The command was

Code:

sudo apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

and reboot. Although this was a fresh install it did found something to remove. I'm no expert so I'm not sure was it necessary.

Then I istalled Nvidia drivers with

Code:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings

and reboot.

The the X didn't show up right meaning sreen resolution was still wrong but

Code:

sudo nvidia-xconfig

in terminal fixed it. Rebooted again. Then I used

Code:

alsamixer

to unmute all Nvidias SPDIF channels and rebooted.

After that reboot I checked Sound preferences to make sure if Hardware and Output tabs had right sound card, Nvidia and
not the internal one. Finally

Code:

aplay -l

showed Nvidia was with me and with

Code:

speaker-test -c 6 -r 48000 -D hw:1,9

(bold digit 6 because I have 5.1 system and bold 1,9 is my sound card) I got nice buzzing on right speakers. Now I got 5.1 sound
on VLC after configuring it to use output ALSA, use S/PDIF and choosing my soundcard number 1,9.

I even got right sound out of Movie player and Ubuntu sound theme working (from Sound preferences - tab Sound Effects, not on
logging in though (no drums) but when Desktop arrives it does make it's sound) thanks to with this post.

Open file with

Code:

gksu gedit /etc/asound.conf

Mine looks like this, card 1 and device 9 aka 1,9

Code:

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
device 9
}

and saved it. And reboot.

Now the original problem, XBMC sound. Thanks to this post I finally did it: I used a Custom device called hw:1,9 in both Audio
output device and Passthrough output device and got 5.1 sound through HDMI in XBMC working including XBMC menusounds!

I am not so sure if so many reboots is necessary but after spending far far more than 50 hours to this I didn't want to take any risks.
Bookmarking this post to myself for the future need.