[Alsa-user] ac3 passthrough not working (white noise)

[Pedro L. <pa...@dr...>]

Hi,

I'm using an S/PDIF connection to my receiver (HW and SW details
at the end). PCM output works fine (after configuring the digital
output to be the default), however AC3 and DTS passthrough do not.

I followed the wiki article (http://alsa.opensrc.org/DigitalOut)
I've tried aplay with the raw AC3 samples linked in the wiki page
and also mplayer's passthrough option with a DVD.  The result is
just white noise, and the receiver continues to indicate PCM
source.

A lot of googling for this kind of problem turned up nothing, so
any help would be much appreciated.

Pedro


HW info:
Soundcard is the very common Intel P965/ICH8R chipset onboard
audio (aplay -L lists it as "HDA Intel, AD198x")
Driver is "snd_hda_intel"

SW info:
distro: ubuntu 9.04
kernel version: 2.6.28 (distro package)
alsa version: 1.0.18 (distro package)