User Manual:HDAudioPassthrough
Those are preliminary information on how to enable HD audio passthrough over HDMI (currenly E-AC3, TrueHD and DTS-HD MA).
Not all video cards are equal. You need a video card with built-in audio chipset, and hdmi port and known to support HBR (high bit-rate).
Chips known *not* to support it:
- ION first generation
- nVidia 9400M IGP
- nVidia 8xxx, 9xxx
Chips known to support HBR:
- ION2
- nVidia GT4xx
- nVidia GT5xx
Though not officially supported, it works to some extent with nVidia GT2xx ; your mileage may vary. It is highly dependent of the combination between audio processor/amplifier and video card.
You'll need a recent linux kernel (>= 2.6.36) that contains the required ALSA drivers.
Alternatively get the latest ALSA driver from the git repository
git clone git://git.alsa-project.org/alsa-driver.git alsa-driver git clone git://git.alsa-project.org/alsa-kmirror.git alsa-kmirror cd alsa-driver ./gitcompile sudo make install
Alsa library 1.0.23 is the required minimum. However if you had to mess with the device name to get basic audio working, it is strongly recommended you get a new version as otherwise you will likely have to mess with alsa configuration file.
git clone git://git.alsa-project.org/alsa-lib.git alsa-lib cd alsa-lib ./git-compile sudo make install