[mythtvnz] Next problem --- Audio over DVI to HDMI

[Douglas Pearless]

I faced the same problem with my GT9400 card.

If it is a fanless one, be very careful as it may well have a fan  
header and not a SPDIF header.  A few people have toasted their  
motherboard's audio this way connecting their graphic card's 12v fan  
header to the SPDIF audio input on their motherboard. (Not me  
thankfully).

I tried al sorts of methods, in the end I purchased a cheap NVIDIA  
GT220 card which has integrated 8 channel digital audio over HDMI,  
plus the graphics processor is faster than a GT9400 & disabled the  
onboard integrated audio.

I had to patch ALSA to get it going, and I have audio fade every 10  
minutes or so for about 2 seconds, BUT an engineer at NVIDIA has been  
working with the ALSA developers and they are almost there with an  
official patch for ALSA.

I then ran the HDMI over 2xcat5e using a pair of baluns and I am very  
happy with this (my media server is 10m from my lounge).  I also run a  
wireless infrared remote using USB over cat5e which means later I can  
add a USB hub in my lounge and plug in a DVD player, etc.

Just need to get the final patches for ALSA sorted...

Cheers
Douglas.

Quoting Ross and Jemima Knudsen <ross.jemima at gmail.com>:

> Nick Rout wrote:
>  > yes you can. Some chipsets will let you do this. dvi and hdmi are
>> electrically equivalent and the plugs don't care what is in the
>> digital signal they carry.
>>
>> If it's an integrated video chipset (ie on motherboard) it may not
>> need any physical connection set up. If it's a discrete graphics card
>> you probably need a cable from the motherboard spdif header to the
>> graphics card.
>>
>> But it depends on your hardware!
>>
>> I thought surround51 was for setups where you have 6 analogue speakers
>> connected to your computer, eg by three 3.5mm stereo plugs. I think
>> you should be looking for alsa:iec958. But what does aplay -L and
>> aplay -l say? (that's upper and lowercase -L)
>>
>
> I posted the output of those commands here:
> http://pastebin.com/2ywM4Ppc
>
> The graphics card is discrete but I can't remember the brand, I'll have
> to have a look and might open the case to see if there is a spdif header
> on the card.
>
> As for ASLA:surround51, I remember reading somewhere that that was a
> 'fix' for the problem I encountered when I upgraded.  I can't remember
> where the post was though.  I obviously need to change it as you
> described.  I have been running analogue stereo speakers using
> ALSA:default on 0.21/Jaunty but when I upgraded to either Karmic or 0.22
> the sound stopped working and only changing to ALSA:surround51 gave me
> anything.  But that won't matter if I can get the sound over the DVI cable!
>
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