[SOLVED] HDMI Audio Not Working

[Kissell]

hmmm. so I plugged in a TV with an HDMI cable and got video! awesome! but oh no, there's no sound!
This is from a laptop with an ATI Radeon card built in. Analog audio works and plays out from the laptop's speakers. But selecting the HDMI card doesn't play audio out the TV speakers. I know the hardware is good, because it works in Ubuntu, and so linux can do it. But nothing I'm trying in Fedora 16 is working.

When playing a video in VLC I go to TOOLS / PREFERENCES / AUDIO and choose ALSA audio output for (hw:0,0) and it plays on the laptop speakers, but when I choose the other two options it doesn't play any sound. It should play sound on HDMI using (hw:1,3) but it doesn't. Anyone got any ideas? I've seen lots of posts about it, and people saying it was a pain, but nothing has worked for me so far.

When I run aplay I see the audio cards listed in VLC.

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

[oldcpu]

What graphic driver are you using ? proprietary fglrx ? or open source radeon ? Its typically the graphic driver that provides this HDMI functionality.

I read that the HDMI audio module is disabled by default in kernel >=3.0 for most GNU/Linux distributions.

On some GNU/Linux distributions (I do not know if this is the case for Fedora) you can add radeon.audio=1 as a kernel boot code to enable HDMI in the radeon graphic driver.

If you are using the fglrx graphic driver then I think HDMI should 'just work' without any boot codes.

[Kissell]

I thought the video would be a separate issue.

Video is working great, I hate to screw it up...

The system info says I'm using "Gallium 0.4 on AMD RS780 "

I don't remember which one Gallium is... I know I had issues trying to get the proprietary radeon drivers installed from their website. I think I ended up not using it.

I've used Ubuntu for many years, and never had a problem with this post-Hardy (in 2008). I recently tried Fedora again, and there are several things about it I like better... but HDMI audio is a deal breaker for me.

I guess i'll play with the video driver and see if I can get things even more screwed up.

---------- Post added at 12:19 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:14 AM ----------

You're right, I'm not using the ATI drivers...

Did a "yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst.x86_64" and it's downloading it now... but I'm on a Marriot hotel Wifi, so it's going to take like an hour...

as I remember it, these drivers don't work for me for some reason... and it really creates a big mess... hmm... we'll see... I'd rather be running these video drivers, I just dropped that issue since I had video straightened out without it. But video does playback kinda "pausy" sometimes... so maybe this will fix everything.

---------- Post added at 12:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:19 AM ----------

Well, you're a genius... it works!

The driver in the repository was version 12.4, which is newer than last time I tried, it was like on 12.1 back then... and this time it worked OOTB.

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by Kissell

You're right, I'm not using the ATI drivers...
.....
Did a "yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst.x86_64" and it's downloading it now...
...
it works!

The driver in the repository was version 12.4, which is newer than last time I tried, it was like on 12.1 back then... and this time it worked OOTB.

Good news !

A correction to my previous post, where I stated:

Originally Posted by oldcpu

I read that the HDMI audio module is disabled by default in kernel >=3.0 for most GNU/Linux distributions.

I meant to state: I read that the HDMI audio module is disabled by default in kernel >=3.0 for most GNU/Linux distributions with the radeon open source graphic driver.

[Kissell]

Video flickers now... that's annoying... but I guess audio is working.