Hello there, Before I begin I want to say that pulseaudio is really one of the coolest peaces of software on Linux I have seen in the last years. It took me some time to get the whole picture and where to place pulse exactly, but once I got it the setup was quite easy (using Ubuntu 8.10 with Gnome and a Vanilla KDE4 and of course pavucontrol). For the record, I'm using an Intel HDA (Realtek ACL889A) card onboard and I use the digital output, connected to and external AC3/DTS decoder (Teufel decoderstation3) and headphones/microphone in the front. I wonder actually if there are any decisions made regarding AC3/DTS pass- through and may be life encoding. The only outsider regarding sound output is AC3/DTS where I talk directly to alsa (mplayer -ao alsa -ac hwac3,hwdts,). It would be very cool if I could do something like mplayer -ao pulse -ac hwac3,hwdts,. The stream would show up in pulse control and I can imagine that even moving the stream to another (digital) output could realized. Obviously any other normal output on a digital output would have been muted/discarded when pass-through output is started (At the moment I have to make sure that there is no active output before starting pass-through output). A second pass-through stream should also be muted/discarded until the output is free again. (Actually I guess this is the same work-flow as on Windows). I read somewhere that a big showstopper for this is the detection of digital devices. Why not just adding a module parameter for that, because I guess that most users, including me, already have to add the digital output by hand, so e.g.: load-module module-alsa-sink device=iec958:0 capabilities=spdif,.. until hal/alsa gives some more information. Additionally having a post-processing module like ladspa for live encoding like the windows counterparts Dolby Digital Live of even better DTS Connect would made pulse the _real_ audio control software imho. But I already read about license issues, I don't know what possibilities are there :( Just to be sure: these are actually my ideas and nothing more :) (and not at all meant as criticism or offensive). And if everything has been said earlier then there is no need to respond either.. Regards, jens
