SPDIF OUT NVIDIA 8400GS HDMI no sound

[philp]

Hi
I have a Nvidia 8400GS graphica card. I have connected a SONY TV to its HDMI port. The picture works fine, but the sound does not. I have connected a SPDIF cable from the motherboard to the graphics card. The system is dual bootable and with windows the sound worked immediately with no problems. I cannot get the sound to work with Fedora 17...I've googled it and spent several hours trying to get it to work..but without success.

I followed the instructions on
//wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture.

I've used gpasswd to add my user name to the audio group.
I've run alsamixer -V all
and the default is set to PulseAudio?
If I choose Intel ICH as the sound card I have enabled the S/PDIF option (MM to 00).
I've rebooted with no luck.

aplay -l

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: ICH [Intel ICH], device 0: Intel ICH [Intel ICH]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: ICH [Intel ICH], device 2: Intel ICH - IEC958 [Intel ICH - IEC958]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Using the above I edited the file /etc/asound.conf to have
defaults.pcm.card 0
defaults.pcm.device 2
defaults.ctl.card 0

lsmod | grep '^snd' | column -t gives me
snd_intel8x0 33100 1
snd_ac97_codec 104777 1 snd_intel8x0
snd_pcm 81297 2 snd_ac97_codec,snd_intel8x0
snd_page_alloc 13709 2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm
snd_timer 23742 1 snd_pcm
snd 63133 6 snd_ac97_codec,snd_intel8x0,snd_timer,snd_pcm

ls -l /dev/snd gives me
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 6 Jul 19 15:09 controlC0
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 5 Jul 19 15:09 pcmC0D0c
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 4 Jul 19 15:09 pcmC0D0p
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 3 Jul 19 15:09 pcmC0D1c
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 2 Jul 19 17:18 pcmC0D2p
crw-rw----. 1 root audio 116, 1 Jul 19 15:09 seq
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116, 33 Jul 19 15:09 timer

I must admit I dont understand this sound stuff, but feel sure that I am probably missing something obvious??
Should alsamixer show PulseAudio as the default?
Also with Fedora 17 is there an easy way to start alsa (which I presume is somesort of server foe sound???

Any help appreciated.....meanwhile I will struggle on trying different stuff

Has anybody got any suggestions??? Thanks

[JEO]

Yes, alsamixer will show pulseaudio as the default. In order to control your hardware, you need to specify the hardware card on the alsamixer command line. To control the first card use alsamixer -c 0, the 2nd card alsamixer -c 1 and so on.

You don't need to do anything special to start alsa. Pulseaudio is a sound server that runs on top of alsa, which in turn controls the hardware sound cards.

[philp]

Thanks JEO
I only have the one card which has device 0 and device 2 on it. When I type alsamixer -c 0 in it displays
Master,Master Mono, PCM, Surround, Center.....Duplicate, External.
Most of these I have turned on, but S/PDIF Playback Source is set to PCM. Should I set this to IEC958 In?? or should it be PCM?

I did read in one post that I should be using yje Nvidia grphics driver, as the fedora driver does not work properly with SPDIF HDMI.

Unfortunately I had megga problems when I installed the Nvidia driver last week where the text was to small to read on the SONY 38 inch wcreen. I had to give up on that, especially since it works fine with the default driver.

Could that be my basic problem?

By the way aplay -l ; is that telling me that there is one sound card on my PC and that it has two devices. I ssume that I should somehow be telling the system that it should by default be using device 2 i.e. the IEC959?

[philp]

More information I re-installed nvidia just in case it was the nouvre driver that was preventing it from working. I fixed the small font problem by going into system settings and Application Appearance and selecting fonts and increasing the force fonts size to be 110 DPI (Actually had to hook another monitor up in order to read the text in order to change it)...but I am running with nvidia driver now.

Unfortunately it has not fixed the sound problem, so I will keep trying. Its so annoying...winfows worked first time...I just plugged the SPDIF in with the SONY TV and everything just worked!!!

I'm going to keep trying...
Thanks for reading this.