[mythtv-users] Lost audio on Pundit SPDIF audio out.

[Gary Raposo]

Hi everyone,

I'm about ready to give up here so I thought I'd shoot my situation out 
over the list to see if anyone else has experienced this.  Had MythTV v.011 
up and running and all was great!  Then all of a sudden... no sound!  The 
system was "in production" so it's not like I was tinkering with it at the 
time so this was a little bit of a shock.

I've got the SPDIF out from the front of the Pundit connected to my home 
theatre receiver.  The receiver has been detecting the PCM stereo stream up 
until now and has had no problems decoding it.  Now it's as if the receiver 
does not see the optical input (autodetect does not work and forcing the 
receiver to optical does not work either).

I can see the red light coming from the SPDIF out port so I know that 
something is happening on the Pundit side.  I've tested the receiver input 
port and cable using a known good cable and my DVD player.  I went through 
all the permutations and isolated it down to the Pundit.  Now... I'm not 
sure if this is a hardware problem or a software problem.

I checked alsamixer and the settings were unchanged (unmuted master, master 
m, and PCM).  The interesting thing is that if I plug in some headphones or 
computer speakers I can hear the audio so it really seems like it's not a 
hardware problem.

My question is... does ALSA have some control over directing audio out over 
the SPDIF interface or is the SPDIF just a slave managed bu the hardware 
that mirrors the audio to all available outbound ports on the box?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  I've looked through the list 
archived and googled around but I can't find anyone that's using the 
optical out on the Pundit that's having the same problem.  I'd like to stay 
with the optical audio since my next mini-project will be to install a DVD 
player so having the digital 5.1 sound would be nice.  Maybe I have a bad 
SPDIF out port on the Pundit?  Who knows?  Hopefully, it's just a software 
setting that I have to change.

HW Config:
Asus Pundit case/mobo
2.4GHz/512MB/120GB
2xPVR 250 tuners

SW Config:
RedHat 9
Myth v0.11
ALSA v0.9.8

Thanks!

Gary Raposo                                              gary at raposo.ca
Eschew obfuscation...                              http://www.raposo.ca