Because I’ll forget otherwise..

Now, this system has been upgraded through about 6 versions of Ubuntu, so the fact it works at all is a bit of a win. Anyway..

Couldn’t get sound out of the HDMI from the Pulse Audio; it wasn’t disabled in alsamixer or similar, in fact I couldn’t find a reference to it. After going through a number of ask Ubuntu posts, this one finally worked for me. The solution is as follows;

Get details of your sound card with;
aplay -l

which gave me;

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: VT1708S Analog [VT1708S Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: VT1708S Digital [VT1708S Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Then, test you can output to the HDMI device with (in my case)
speaker-test -c 2 -r 48000 -D hw:0,3
which should play static through each output in turn

This command will give you the current Pulse Audio setup;
pacmd list-cards

e.g. output like this;

john@myth:~$ pacmd list-cards
Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information.
>>> 1 card(s) available.
index: 0
name:
driver:
owner module: 4
properties:
alsa.card = "0"
alsa.card_name = "HDA NVidia"
alsa.long_card_name = "HDA NVidia at 0xfae78000 irq 21"
alsa.driver_name = "snd_hda_intel"
device.bus_path = "pci-0000:00:08.0"
sysfs.path = "/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.0/sound/card0"
device.bus = "pci"
device.vendor.id = "10de"
device.vendor.name = "NVIDIA Corporation"
device.product.name = "MCP79 High Definition Audio"
device.form_factor = "internal"
device.string = "0"
device.description = "Built-in Audio"
module-udev-detect.discovered = "1"
device.icon_name = "audio-card-pci"
profiles:
output:analog-stereo: Analog Stereo Output (priority 6000)
output:analog-stereo+input:analog-stereo: Analog Stereo Duplex (priority 6060)
output:analog-surround-40: Analog Surround 4.0 Output (priority 700)
output:analog-surround-40+input:analog-stereo: Analog Surround 4.0 Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 760)
output:analog-surround-41: Analog Surround 4.1 Output (priority 800)
output:analog-surround-41+input:analog-stereo: Analog Surround 4.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 860)
output:analog-surround-50: Analog Surround 5.0 Output (priority 700)
output:analog-surround-50+input:analog-stereo: Analog Surround 5.0 Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 760)
output:analog-surround-51: Analog Surround 5.1 Output (priority 800)
output:analog-surround-51+input:analog-stereo: Analog Surround 5.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 860)
output:iec958-stereo: Digital Stereo (IEC958) Output (priority 5500)
output:iec958-stereo+input:analog-stereo: Digital Stereo (IEC958) Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 5560)
output:hdmi-stereo: Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output (priority 5400)
output:hdmi-stereo+input:analog-stereo: Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 5460)
output:hdmi-surround: Digital Surround 5.1 (HDMI) Output (priority 300)
output:hdmi-surround+input:analog-stereo: Digital Surround 5.1 (HDMI) Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 360)
input:analog-stereo: Analog Stereo Input (priority 60)
off: Off (priority 0)
active profile:
sinks:
alsa_output.pci-0000_00_08.0.analog-stereo/#0: Built-in Audio Analog Stereo
sources:
alsa_output.pci-0000_00_08.0.analog-stereo.monitor/#0: Monitor of Built-in Audio Analog Stereo
alsa_input.pci-0000_00_08.0.analog-stereo/#1: Built-in Audio Analog Stereo
ports:
analog-output: Analog Output (priority 9900, available: unknown)
properties:

hdmi-output-0: HDMI / DisplayPort (priority 5900, available: unknown)
properties:

I was then able to set the correct profile, after some trial and error, with;
pactl set-card-profile 0 output:hdmi-surround
The sound quality isn’t great, but then, neither is the TV..

Hopefully this will be useful for someone.. I started with MythTV from MythBuntu 09.04, and after the upgrade 10.10, not that the upgrade helped (I’d tried upgrading a number of times since the original release, and it looks like someone has fixed the failing backage that always b0rked the upgrade – thank you, whoever you are, as I never managed to get enough time to document and raise a bug myself).

After the digital retune in the UK, I found our MythTV box wasn’t recording or playing BBC channels any more (not all, fortunately, CBeebies was still being recorded so 2.0 could get his fix of Wibbly Pig and Timmy Time (best thing on TV..)).

Much swapping of cables and checking signals ensued (thank goodness for MythTV showing the signal % on the live TV display when you switch channels), along with retuning the Hauppauge USB receiver via the mythtv-setup interface, but to no avail.  I also upgraded MythBuntu to 10.10 (just in time for 11.04, I guess!) – flawlessly, thanks Ubuntu people!

Dimly remembering some similar debugging in the past (and hence the reason I’m blogging this, so I can find it next time), I removed the failing channels via the mythweb interface (the mythsetup interface I found tricky to delete in) and reran the channel rescan, adding channels as prompted and mythfill.  It took a long time to run, but success!

So I could video Dr Who.  Hurrah!