[mythtv-users] optical SPDIF output on nforce4 mobo: Success (of a sort)

[Greg Woods]

On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 22:41 -0400, Adam Hirsch wrote:
> Greg Woods (greg at gregandeva.net) wrote:
> 
> > So it's back to square one and trying a different approach.
> 
> Well, for what it's worth, I've got my optical port working, more or less.
> I run alsamixer, set 
> 
>   Item: IEC958 
> 
>  to [PCM]
> 
> and 
> 
>  Item: IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA 
> 
>  to 0 

I can report partial success with my ASUS P4P800-E mobo w/Realtek ALC850
chip. My mixer doesn't have this last item, but it does have a mute for
the IEC958 device which I had to unmute. I also had to adjust the
asoundrc file because "aplay -l" showed that my digital device is "4"
rather than "2" (so I change "device 2" to "device 4"). If I now go into
Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> General and hit Next twice to bring up the
sound page, set the sound device to "ALSA:digital", and the mixer device
to either "mixed-analog" or "mixed-digital" (results are the same either
way), I now get sound out my optical output. Unfortunately, the sound is
in the center speaker only, so I've still got some work to do here (any
tips?)

--Greg