[SOLVED] No Sound over HDMI

[SOLVED] No Sound over HDMI

Postby BlueDragon » Feb 25th, '17, 05:25

Hi all,

I can't get any sound over HDMI and no sound at all from media players (.mkv for instance).

Scenario 1: I play some Flash Player video in Firefox: No sound over HDMI but audio is working over the LINE OUT from the mainboard.
Scenario 2: I play a movie from a .mkv file (VLC or Dragon Player or SMPlayer) and I can't get any sound at all.

I tried to tinker around in the MCC (Sound Config) and in the Systems Settings - Multimedia/Audio Playback/Music (KDE) (or right click on the sound icon in the task bar - Audio Setup / Select Master Channel) without success. Note that if I use 'Test', first time sound is coming, next time I get the error "Failed to set the selected audio output device". I have to close totally the system settings window and come back again to test. Otherwise no device is displayed at all under Music-Device Preference. It's quite buggy and confusing. Besides in the 'Audio Hardware Setup' tab, I can successfuly test Front Left/Right over HDMI and Line Out.

The mainboard is having an integrated sound card (line out) and the video adapter is a AMD Radeon 6450. The MCC tells me that the Radeon card is using the "snd_hda_intel" driver.

Thanks for any help.
Last edited by BlueDragon on Mar 4th, '17, 18:01, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: No Sound over HDMI

Postby doktor5000 » Feb 26th, '17, 02:36

You describe at least 3 different problems

- can't get any sound over HDMI
- no sound at all from media players (.mkv for instance)
- issues with sound in flash player

Please only one problem per thread, otherwise this gets really messy really fast.

Apart from that you're missing one bit of information, like which HDMI output do you use? onboard, from a dedicated soundcard or from the GPU?
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Re: No Sound over HDMI

Postby BlueDragon » Feb 26th, '17, 06:57

Hmmm, I believe(d) that the problems are actually inter-related. Let's start with getting sound over the HDMI cable and we can address the media player problem after. Flash Player is ok so far I think.

Presently I have the HDMI cable connected to the graphic card. Another small jack to jack cable is connected to the mainboard line output. What I would like to reach is to have the sound pass over the HDMI cable (so I can actually disconnect the audio cable from the board).

I hope that clarifies the situation. Sorry for not having been exhaustive. :)

Thank you
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Re: No Sound over HDMI

Postby doktor5000 » Feb 27th, '17, 01:56

Well, usually the problem is the other way around, as mostly the HDMI output is the preferred one by default and most people need to configure the default channel to be the analog one - in your case it's the opposite.
I need to dig up my notes regarding HDMI, I believe I've got a short explanation from our pulseaudio maintainer for that HDMI issue. Ping me again tomorrow or so In case I forget to reply.
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Re: No Sound over HDMI

Postby BlueDragon » Feb 27th, '17, 06:07

That would be very nice from you dok.

doktor5000 wrote:Well, usually the problem is the other way around, as mostly the HDMI output is the preferred one by default and most people need to configure the default channel to be the analog one - in your case it's the opposite.


Yes, the HDMI cable is needed anyway (for video), not the analog one. :D
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Re: No Sound over HDMI

Postby doktor5000 » Feb 28th, '17, 01:40

Maybe I misremembered, or it got lost in one of the forum threads and I didn't transfer it to my personal notes.
You could have a look at the threads where he commented, maybe it helps.
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=2594
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=400

Could you please post the output of the following command run as regular user please?

Code: Select all
aplay -l
aplay -L
pactl list cards
pacmd list-sinks
grep -i codec /proc/asound/card*/codec*
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Re: No Sound over HDMI

Postby BlueDragon » Mar 1st, '17, 00:56

Hi Dok,

Thank you very much for your links and the bunch of very useful commands. Overwhelming information actually, part of the super complex (actually overcomplicated) Linux audio model (layers), but I finally could find out what was the problem. :)

Apparently the Linux system took the mainboard audio output as default (actually highest priority over the HDMI output from the video card). I thought I had corrected that before already but... in the system settings under Multimedia --> Audio and Video Settings (Settings for the Phonon multimedia framework) on the 'Device Preference' tab, not only 'Music' or 'Video' must be changed, also 'Audio Playback' which actually seems to be simply a header for all the other entries (Notifications, Music, Video etc.), whereas actually it's about "Default/Unspecified Category". That's unlogical (at least for my logics :? ) but so the simple piece of advise is to change all, so there is no doubt about the effect. Concretely Flash Player (Firefox) is considered as "Unspecified Category", meaning it's not touched by the settings of "Music" or "Video". BTW, some media players are having their own audio settings (like SMPlayer) and others (like Dragon Player) are only relying on the system settings. That can also lead to some unexpected / inconsistent results.

Now going through all again I realise that the only way to have it working, in addition to what I wrote above, is to deactivate the PulseAudio (uncheck the check box in the MCC under Hardware-->Sound Configuration). Doing this, I have a choice of Audio Playback Devices (actually priority, changed through "Prefer"/"Defer" Arrows Up/Down) and so there I can switch between analog audio (mainboard built in) and HDMI (Radeon video card over HDMI). If opposed to this, I leave the PulseAudio check box (see above, MMC) checked (default I guess), then as a result I will have only "PulseAudio Sound Server" as single option left for Audio Playback (and all the sub categories), hence no way at all to switch do the HDMI output !

The "Audio Hardware Setup" tab in the system setting should allow to test the R/L speakers. With my present configuration (no PulseAudio) it's simply not working at all. Regardless it's important to have the desired device (HDMI in my case) in the "Audio Hardware Setup" tab, under Sound Card and under Sound Device. Like this it's now working for me, I have all the audio output signals going to my Radeon video card (HDMI).

I'm not totally satisfied though with this setup, because I would like the audio signal to go the inbuild monitor speakers over HDMI AND at the same time, to have them going to the speaker jack (analog) of the mainboard, which is not working. I can have either the signal going out over HDMI (digital) OR over the speaker jack ouput (PC case front panel, analog) but not both together. To switch I haved to open the system settings and either change the priority on the "Device Preference" tab (see above) or to deactivate the Radeon HDMI on the "Audio Hardware Setup" tab.

I hope all that makes sense. It's a mess between MMC and system settings, like it will probably always be, because of the way all has been built up.
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Re: No Sound over HDMI

Postby doktor5000 » Mar 2nd, '17, 01:37

Hate to tell you, but disabling pulse is usually not the right way to go. It might work, but it creates other issues and you don't get some of the benefits.

If you want to have output to two outputs at the same time, you'd have to use something like described in http://www.6by9.net/output-to-multiple- ... with-alsa/
For pulseaudio you would only need to combine the two sinks: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pu ... log_output

Reading that, you should probably take a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pu ... figuration as that might be the problem you see.
Can't really help much with the HDMI bit because I simply don't use it, just analog output here.
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Re: No Sound over HDMI

Postby BlueDragon » Mar 4th, '17, 07:09

Ok Dok, went through all again and reactivated PulseAudio. The magic ingredients for having sound coming out of both the analog and digital outputs (analog onboard and HDMI from the graphic adapter) were:

1) Set the system wide default input and output sources as needed, by adding the source names to /etc/pulse/default.pa

2)
To setup the analog device as a secondary source, add the following to the /etc/pulse/default.pa configuration at the beginning, before any other modules are loaded:
### Load analog device
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,0
load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combined
set-default-sink combined


3) Set the 'Audio Playback Preference' in the 'Settings for the Phonon Multimedia Framework' within the System Settings to 'Simultaneous output...'

4) A reboot (never found a proper way to restart PulseAudio by command line or simply with a log out/in) and finally tinkering around with the KDE Mixer to select the proper 'Master Channel' and adjust the various Mixer Playback Devices as needed.

So "simple" it was... :lol:
Last edited by BlueDragon on Mar 4th, '17, 18:03, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: No Sound over HDMI

Postby doktor5000 » Mar 4th, '17, 16:04

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [SOLVED], thanks

BlueDragon wrote:4) A reboot (never found a proper way to restart PulseAudio by command line or simply with a log out/in)

Just try with pulseaudio -k as user, as pulse will auto-respawn.
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Re: [SOLVED] No Sound over HDMI

Postby evaldas » Oct 14th, '17, 18:37

I have the same problem. My question: is there graphic way to change output preferences?
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Re: [SOLVED] No Sound over HDMI

Postby doktor5000 » Oct 15th, '17, 17:30

Yes, either via the graphic mixer of your desktop environment, or you could take a look at paprefs / pavucontrol.
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Re: [SOLVED] No Sound over HDMI

Postby evaldas » Oct 18th, '17, 19:49

Yes, indeed as simple as it is... Somehow one speaker is not working but I will find out later
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Re: [SOLVED] No Sound over HDMI

Postby xboxboy » Oct 19th, '17, 00:26

I added a HDMI monitor, and could never get sound out of it either. In the speaker test, I could activate left and right speakers, but never get any audio from anything out of them. Then one of the threads doc linked to suggested turning off the onboard audio in the BIOS.

So I did, reboot, and WOW, all audio through the monitor. Awesome.
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