Complete mess of audio setup

Question

For almost a year now, I've had audio play through SPDIF to a 5.1 surround receiver.  Both surround and stereo worked like a charm through 1 cable.  I haven't bothered watching a movie on this system in nearly 2 months, but when I tried to today, I noticed the surround wasn't working.  It wasn't just movies but .ac3 files too.  Aside from being able to hear the difference, my surround receiver has a bright blue light on it that signifies when it's receiving 5.1 audio over digital, and it wasn't turning on.  I do not have pulseaudio installed, because when using SPDIF, you don't really need to configure anything when using just ALSA.  That being said, all analog channels have always been their defaults (so rear left/right, side left/right, and center/LFE are all by default set to front left/right channels).
But my problem gets weirder.  Aside from SPDIF only playing in stereo, I can ONLY get surround sound out of analog!  If I try playing stereo out of analog, it's a garbled noisy mess, but 5.1 channel files play just fine and in their correct channels.  This makes no sense, since I have *never* been able to get surround sound to work out of analog in linux, and I didn't even touch anything.
What I think is going on is ALSA is somehow confusing the analog output with the digital output.
For some additional information:
* I'm running KDE 4.11.3 (perhaps the recently updated phonon has something to do with this?)
* Deleting the phonon settings file did not fix the problem
* In VLC, I have SPDIF as my main audio device
* In VLC, I tried using the "Use SPDIF when available" checkbox.  Interestingly, the blue light on the surround receiver turns on when I do this, but I can't hear anything.
* I do NOT have an active .asoundrc file
Last edited by schmidtbag (2013-11-09 00:11:40)

Answer 1

Aside from the glitchy window, if what I experienced is normal, I don't think I'm going to want to use MPV.  One of the reasons I avoided mplayer and mplayer2 is specifically because I really don't feel like configuring such programs via a text file, especially when it generates a blank one.  I also like having a configurable playlist and more playback controls directly on the GUI itself.  One of the reasons I liked VLC so much is because it is (or was) a very capable program that let me do everything I wanted to do without having to reference a manual page, and it doesn't depend on other programs (MPV relies on command lines, file browsers, text editors, etc).  MPV may be a very powerful and capable program but I find it too clumsy to use and too slow to configure.  When it comes to media related programs, I don't have the patience to be setting up something like that by hand.  It takes so little to make 1 mistake that breaks everything and not understand why.  GUIs not only speed up the process of configuring a program but they reduce human error because they show everything you can do right in front of you and they let you know what is a valid value. A well-designed GUI will prevent you from making contradictory choices.
I'm fine with using text-based config files (I'm using Arch after all) but if there's 1 thing about linux I hate, it's configuring anything media related by hand.  There's just simply too many paths you can take and it's NEVER clear which ones are the ones you want/need.
Last edited by schmidtbag (2013-11-09 20:35:17)