Weird sound issue

[darrenmason]

Hi,

Setting up an MD on a new core that I have installed at home (one of the latest snapshots)

Everything went ok-ish (once I dealt with the end of life intrepid issues)

Anyway... Setting up a new MD. AVWizard goes through OK. Get to the audio settings and need to turn the volume right up and jump over to a terminal (ctrl-alt-f2) and turn all the levels up in alsamixer. This is not a major issue - it seems to be fine I can hear the sample music at the required volume. Finish the wizard and assign the room etc, screens are generated etc All seems pretty normal.

Reboot the MD and go to watch tv, video or audio and there is no sound. So I switch to another console terminal to see if the sound card levels are wrong or have been muted and as soon as I switch consoles I can hear the sound. I switch back to the X screen and the sound stops. This consistently happens for all media types and all consoles. ie: I hear the sound that is playing when I switch to any other console screen other than F7 but when I go into that the sound stops.

Ideas please?

[darrenmason]

Anyone have any ideas here? I am struggling. Have googled and found people with sort of similar issues but no resolutions that work for me. Getting close to a complete reinstall

[bongowongo]

I had some similar issues on a very recent snapshot <can look it up wich one if you want to lazy now>
no sound.
Did reinstall, but before linuxmce script, I changed sources.list and apt-get dist-upgrade
In that install I didn't have sound issues.
It could be that your sources.list is not correct or not correct in the MD creation.

[darrenmason]

This has been progressively driving me nuts for the last few weeks and has had me do several rebuilds of the MD and a full system reinstall.

Additionally, I have put in a seperate sound card...


I then realised that something else must be happening so I plugged headphones in the line out and the sound was fine (in both the console and the main X screen)

This led me to the sound cable or the TV - both of which where previously working on the old installation.

Then it occurred to me that I had put a new video card in (so I can use vdapau). Given that it seemed to work fine straight away - hadn't given it a second thought. I was wrong.

The setup is a DVI->HDMI cable to the TV and an Analog cable for the sound (3.5mm -> 3.5mm). The input jack on the TV states the 3.5mm jack is for audio associated with DVI/VGA signals.
It seems that the new video card sends something in its signal such that the TV decides to not use the external sound - but it is only when the graphical display is visible (ie: the console is fine).

So the MD sound was fine all along - it was the TV choosing to ignore it based on the video signal.

The next question then ..... WHY? Can anyone help with what is actually happening and perhaps if there is a setting in the video driver and / or xorg.conf to stop the current behaviour.

Took the video card (and the additional sound card) out of the machine for now but would like to use it if possible.

Regards
Darren