Ati Card And Hdmi Audio

[BugJackBaron]

Hey guys. I recently bought a a big 30" LED tv and connected it to my DELL laptop with a standard 1GB Ati card.

So far no linux distro has worked "out of the box" in getting HDMI audio to come through the tv speakers. Video is no problem.

I realize this is due to my testing Live DVDs but before I do a dual boot with win 7(preinstlled) I just wonder

if anyone has had good HDMI experience with ATI

and any linux distro.

Ubuntu? Fedora?

Thx in advance.

[justsumhelp]

Have you made sure to check the audio out options in the sound preferences, and made sure its set to hdmi? Never had a problem on ubuntu with either nvidia or ATI in the last 2 years

[volk666]

Does that laptop have onboard Intel video that comes with iCore series? It might have Ati card but Linux loads and uses Intel drivers.

Are you sure Windows uses ATI for playing videos? Win7 on my notebook switches to dedicated video card (nvidia) only under heavy load (like graphic intensive games). Linux doesn't do switches yet, I believe, or didn't - when I investigated the issue a year or two ago.

Without going into details, can you try to play your videos in SMplayer and fiddle with audio drivers in preferences? The advantage of using SMplayer here is that you can easily see and flip through all audio drivers installed by your distro.

Skype, I believe, also has this option in preferences. VLC is a bit trickier, as I remember.

If you are only trying Live Cds then their default drivers might not be the best available once you install the full system where you can force it to use Ati card and drivers, for example.

[volk666]

Finally run into a youtube video that played through laptop speakers rather that HDMI connected TV and decided to do something about it, too.

In OpenSuse (under Gnome) open Settings (Configure Desktop under KDE), Sound, Hardware tab, Settings for selected device, choose HDMI output from drop down menu and that's all.

Most of these drivers are loaded by the Linux kernel, btw, so it should be distro independent for generic cases.

Ideally a user shouldn't have to configure it but there still are some disagreements between what kernel thinks is right for you and your desktop defaults.

[dharmabm]

FWIW i've been struggling with this issue for a few days now, trying to setup a spare laptop as an XBMC media server. i have a radeon 4500 series (rv710) and started with arch, after reading tons of forums it seemed that the opensource ATI driver wasn't supporting audio so i switched to the proprietary catalyst driver, no luck there either. switched to crunchbang (debian based) as an experiment, with the same results. i'm going to try a full ubuntu 10.04 desktop today (although i prefer not to use any full DM), and will try 32bit if amd64 doesn't work, i will let you know my results.

BTW, video has worked in all cases so far without any tweaking, only having problems with audio

Edited April 10, 2012 by dharmabm

[volk666]

Why do you want to try a two year old Ubuntu if you want to solve the latest driver problem? Are you sure that HDMI audio support wasn't included in the kernel since then? I don't know but it could have.

Just did a quick search for OpenSuse, HDMI audio and Radeon

http://www.novell.com/linux/releasenotes/x86_64/openSUSE/12.1/#06

Might not be applicable exactly but it's a start, and I haven't searched the forums yet.

Edited April 15, 2012 by volk666

[BugJackBaron]

Does that laptop have onboard Intel video that comes with iCore series? It might have Ati card but Linux loads and uses Intel drivers.

Are you sure Windows uses ATI for playing videos? Win7 on my notebook switches to dedicated video card (nvidia) only under heavy load (like graphic intensive games). Linux doesn't do switches yet, I believe, or didn't - when I investigated the issue a year or two ago.

Without going into details, can you try to play your videos in SMplayer and fiddle with audio drivers in preferences? The advantage of using SMplayer here is that you can easily see and flip through all audio drivers installed by your distro.

Skype, I believe, also has this option in preferences. VLC is a bit trickier, as I remember.

If you are only trying Live Cds then their default drivers might not be the best available once you install the full system where you can force it to use Ati card and drivers, for example.

Yes I'm sure win7 uses the ATI card as this machine is a cheaper Dell and doesn't have the dual switching ability.

I'm fairlly sure that any linux can do this as long as you use the ati driver and it's up-to-date.

Right now I run Mageia and others in virtual machines so of course there is no way to test. It's a company laptop and I don't want to mess with the inside too much . And of course Live distros never include proprietary drivers in them(a few may have flash)

I hope to try running a distro from a thumb drive to test.

[volk666]

Afaik, dual switching ability is "built in" for iCore chips and can be utilized by Windows if separate video card driver allows it and it's done on the fly, without user input.

On Linux it's still a relatively new thing, you need to know your hardware first.

Good place to start:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hybrid_graphics

And this is a year old thread on hybrid graphics in OpenSuse, as I said at that time it was a big unknown but latest drivers and the latest kernel "should" support this feature.

[dharmabm]

to resurrect an old dead thread -- i just rebuilt my xbmc server with the laptop using the ATI card mentioned above, using ubuntu 12.04 server edition, and hdmi audio is working by default with the standard opensource driver. not sure if i did anything differently this time, but i'm not complaining, just happy it works (until the next driver update!)