[SOLVED] Nvidia HDMI audio/sound

[jtang613]

So I recently purchased a new desktop. One thing I was really excited about was my new 23" LCD/LED monitor with HDMI ... and built-in speakers

Well, the HDMI video worked great right out of the box, but to my dismay, the audio was nowhere to be found.

After some research, I learned that the drivers required to support HDMI audio on Nvidia cards are in ALSA >= 1.0.23.

Unfortunately, F13 only has 1.0.22. Now before you reply to correct me, we are referring to the *kernel drivers* here, not the tools/libraries... and although F13 does offer 1.0.23 of the tools and libraries, the drivers are in fact 1.0.22.

So this means we need to retrieve the latest alsa-drivers source from the project site and compile them against our current kernel -- at least until alsa-drivers >= 1.0.23 is merged into the Fedora kernels.

The trouble here is that the alsa-drivers are internal modules, so no amount of kernel-devel or kernel-headers packages will help us compile them, we need the full kernel.src.rpm to compile against.

What follows is a brief howto of what worked for me. Be aware that some of this procedure gets a bit technical so if you're stuck, make sure to read all the references, especially the kernel build stuff.

Let's get started.

Step 1: Download and extract the alsa-driver source package.

wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.23.tar.bz2  
tar xvjf alsa-driver-1.0.23.tar.bz2

Step 2: Download the kernel & build dependancies.

su -c 'yum install yum-utils rpmdevtools'
su -c 'yum-builddep kernel-`uname -r`'
yumdownloader --source kernel-`uname -r`
rpmdev-setuptree
rpm -Uvh kernel-`uname -r`.src.rpm

Step 3: Build the kernel src.rpm in accordance with Fedora Project guidelines:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/CustomKernel

cd ~/rpmbuild 
rpmbuild -bp --target=`uname -m` SPECS/kernel.spec
cd ~/rpmbuild/BUILD/kernel-2.6.`uname -r | cut -d. -f3`/linux-`uname -r`
cp configs/kernel-`uname -r`.config .config
make oldconfig
cp .config ../../../SOURCES/config-x86_64-generic
cd ~/rpmbuild
rpmbuild -bb --target=`uname -m` SPECS/kernel.spec

Go eat lunch... build takes a while.

Step 4: Build and install alsa-driver

cd ~/alsa-driver
./configure --with-card-options=all --with-cards=all --with-kernel=~/rpmbuild/BUILD/kernel-2.6.`uname -r | cut -d. -f3`/linux-`uname -r`/ --with-build=~/rpmbuild/BUILD/kernel-2.6.`uname -r | cut -d. -f3`/linux-`uname -r`/
make
su -c 'make install'

Step 5: Reboot

Step 6: Verify your HDMI devices are available.

aplay -l

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 1: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC1200 Analog [ALC1200 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC1200 Digital [ALC1200 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Yay, HDMI !!!

Step 7: Unmute the HDMI audio using alsamixergui

su -c 'alsa-utils'
alsamixergui

Step 8: Set the Hardware and Output to HDMI using PulseAudio mixer.
See screenshot

Step 9: Edit your /etc/asound.rc according to: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title...T220,_or_GT240

Step 10: Enjoy the HDMI goodness!

If you start seeing errors at any point in the process, stop and debug/fix before proceeding.

This is pretty much what worked for me, your mileage may vary.

- J

[dd_wizard]

You should be able to run the 2.6.35 kernel from the F14 development branch on F13. It includes the 1.0.23 driver:

[makerpm@Mobile-PC SPECS]$ uname -sr
Linux 2.6.35.2-7.rc1.fc14.x86_64

[makerpm@Mobile-PC SPECS]$ grep Driver /tmp/alsa*
Driver version:     1.0.23

Downloading the new kernel and doing a local install is a quick way to update to alsa-driver-1.0.23.

dd_wizard

[TinCanFiru]

Originally Posted by dd_wizard

You should be able to run the 2.6.35 kernel from the F14 development branch on F13. It includes the 1.0.23 driver:

[makerpm@Mobile-PC SPECS]$ uname -sr
Linux 2.6.35.2-7.rc1.fc14.x86_64

[makerpm@Mobile-PC SPECS]$ grep Driver /tmp/alsa*
Driver version:     1.0.23

Downloading the new kernel and doing a local install is a quick way to update to alsa-driver-1.0.23.

dd_wizard

should work?

[jtang613]

Originally Posted by TinCanFiru

should work?

Try it and let us know. For now, my install from src works great for me.

[dd_wizard]

It should work. You can always reboot to your 2.6.34 kernel if it doesn't.

dd_wizard

[six_stitcher]

Thanks jtang613, your posting has helped me resolve the issue with audio over HDMI. Same deal, no sign of the card or device under aplay -l and aplay -L (I've got a NVidia Sparkle GT220).

When I went to follow your instructions it soon became apparent that the latest available FC13 ALSA driver package from the Fedora repos had recently been updated from 1.0.22 to 1.0.23, so it was a simple case of using yum to get 1.0.23. Note that I didn't initially have an ALSA driver installed (onboard sound device worked though, must have been something to do with PulseAudio??), so I had to use 'yum install alsa-driver'. This also upgraded the kernel from 2.6.33.6-147.2.4.fc13.x86_64 to 2.6.34.6-47.fc13.x86_64.

It all appears to be working well, getting audio in various formats over HDMI - even works from MythTV.

Cheers,

Aaron.

[TinCanFiru]

how do I go about installing that kernel with yum?