No digital audio, video too fast

[sojyujai]

I'm just trying out the latest alpha release on my Ubuntu Hardy HTPC and I'm having several problems. I had the same problems on the previous alpha as well.

1. First off I'm not getting any audio when I play any videos. I've tried several different videos with different audio codecs and it's the same problem for all of them (ac3, mp3, faad). In Settings > System > Audio Hardware I've selected Digital, selected both AC3 and DTS capable receiver, and iec958 for both Audio Output Device and Passthrough Output Device. My audio is output through the SPDIF on my motherboard. I've configured this in pulse audio and it works fine in all other software. I use ac3 and dts passthrough in mplayer/smplayer and it also is working fine.

I do seem to get audio from within the boxee interface itself - at least I can hear clicks as I navigate through the menus.

2. All the videos I play seems to be accelerated. It looks like it's playing on fast-forward.

For what it's worth I'm having the same problem with XBMC.

3. When I try to play any music from the music menu I'm getting a seg-fault and boxee is crashing out.

My system: my motherboard is an Asus M3N-H/HDMI with onboard video and audio. The video is a Geforce 8300 chipset and I'm using the NV 173.14.12 drivers. This is my audio info:

$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: ALC883 Analog [ALC883 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: ALC883 Digital [ALC883 Digital]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

(I'm using the digital)


aplay -L
front:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0
HDA NVidia, ALC883 Analog
Front speakers
surround40:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0
HDA NVidia, ALC883 Analog
4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0
HDA NVidia, ALC883 Analog
4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0
HDA NVidia, ALC883 Analog
5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0
HDA NVidia, ALC883 Analog
5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0
HDA NVidia, ALC883 Analog
7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
null
Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)

[marcel]

hi sojyujai
check out these threads and see if any do the trick:

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=538

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=406

http://forum.boxee.tv/showpost.php?p=6253&postcount=5

[riegersn]

Having the same issue only not using digital audio. Video at like 2x and no sound. All these videos worked without issue before update.

[sojyujai]

Thanks for the links.
I already have libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio installed - so that's not the problem.
Reading on the xbmc forums about the fast video - this seems to be a fairly common problem caused by the audio not working. The suggestion usually is to disable pulseaudio. But after all the pain I went through to get pulseaudio working properly on my system I'm reluctant to do that.

Some corrections to my earlier post. I thought this was also happening in xbmc but I tried it again and I am getting audio with it (possibly this was fixed in a recent update?). Now in xbmc music plays and any video that isn't using ac3 (or dts I would guess) is playing with audio (although it has been crashy). But videos with ac3 have the same problem - they play at fast speeds without audio playback - I'm guessing because ac3 passthrough is not working.

But here in boxee no audio is working - ac3 or otherwise.

Another correction regarding problem 3 above - (seg-faults during music playback). This seemed to happen only with the few flac files I was testing with. After more testing: mp3s seem to play fine (although I can't hear any audio so it's hard to be sure). Some other flacs I tried played fine. Some ogg files seemed to play OK while others would start then stop and one time playing an ogg it caused a seg-fault.