Hi,
I have a 5.1 surround amp that can take audio from a variety of sources,
including HDMI output (of which it then strips the sound and forwards
the display on to a connected computer, if any).
This works great; I can play DVDs on my Linux machine, and enjoy a full
surround experience, even if the laptop itself doesn't have a direct 5.1
surround output, and I don't have to get angry at the stupid
nonskippable content the media producers seem to think is a good idea.
But there is one problem: whenever the audio setup changes -- different
codec, different number of channels, etc -- the amplifier needs a few
seconds to reconfigure itself. During that time, there is no audio. In
and of itself, this is not a major problem; it's a bit annoying, but
OTOH I suppose there are many different kinds of audio, and it would not
be completely strange for the amp to require some time to detect what
the new setup is, and how it needs to be used. And when you're watching
a feature-length movie, losing 5 seconds at the beginning isn't exactly
the end of the world.
It gets a bit more annoying when I try to play a number of small files
in succession, however. For some reason, alsa changes the HDMI output
stream to not contain any audio anymore when no application is producing
any output[1]. Some applications (e.g., mplayer) reinitialize the ALSA
device in between files as a matter of course. For other use cases
(e.g., playing a number of movie clips on youtube in non-fullscreen
mode), the "application" (read: browser plugin) needs to be restarted in
between files. Whenver this happens, for a short moment there will not
be an audio stream being sent over the HDMI cable anymore, only for it
to restart after less than a second. People without such a complex setup
won't notice this, but on my system it means I need to wait until I hear
some sound, and then I'll probably have to rewind, since the
"interesting" bits have already started.
To avoid this, what I'd like to be able to do is to configure the system
so that if an application stops producing output, rather than having the
HDMI output stream stop only to start again not a moment later, I'd like
the configuration on the HDMI output to remain as it is, at least for a
while. Obviously this will require the system to produce an "empty"
audio stream, but that's fine.
Alternatively, if that is rather complex, it would be nice to be able to
configure a "default" format, and that the HDMI output does not
reinitialize or do anything if the 'current' configuration happens to be
the same as the 'default' configuration, and an application stops
producing output.
I tried searching the wiki for a way to do this, but I couldn't find it.
Is this possible? If so, how? If not, where do I file wishlist reports?
;-)
[1] I suppose it's a bit more complex than that, but for the point of
this argument that doesn't really matter.
--
The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by
the following formula:
pi zz a
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA
Learn about the latest advances in developing for the
BlackBerry® mobile platform with sessions, labs & more.
See new tools and technologies. Register for BlackBerry® DevCon today!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-devcon-copy1
_______________________________________________
Alsa-user mailing list
Alsa-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
