Solved Sound from HDMI

hakova

hakova

Hi,

I did some search in the forum but couldn't find a thread about my issue. I have a FreeBSD (14.1) media PC that I use the headphone socket for analog audio output, but I would like to get digital audio output from the HDMI instead. HDMI is listed among the audio output devices in Pulse Audio, and I do have a receiver that accepts HDMI input. However, when I switch from analog to digital input on the receiver, I don't get any audio output from it. I tried to define the HDMI input as eARC on the receiver side, but it failed. I would appreciate any pointers to help troubleshoot please.

Thanks!
 
Minbari said:
cat /dev/sndstat ?
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Thank you for the response.

pcm0: <Realtek ALC233 (Analog 2.0+HP/2.0)> (play/rec) pcm1: <Realtek ALC233 (Analog)> (play/rec) default pcm2: <Intel Skylake (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play) No devices installed from userspace.

I also ran the following command to switch to HDMI device with no change in the behavior, although I got confirmation that the default device was switched to 2:
# sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=2

I am not sure if this is relevant information but the PC in question has a display port output, not HDMI. However, I am using a cable with male Display port adapter on one end and male HDMI adapter on the other. Moreover, I have video output on the monitor from the said hardware/wiring.
 
scottro said:
https://srobb.net/pipewire.html

I have a page on getting sound through hdmi with pipewire. The FreeBSD section is towards the end. It also has a link to a page by vermaden, which has some good tips.
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Thank you so much for the response.

I believe what I tried is identical to what you described for pipewire. I also tried vermaden's approach with pulseaudio. With pulseaudio's GUI, I can see that there is movement on Chromium's vumeter (couldn't find a better term for the bar output for the sound) on the screen but there is still no sound coming from the speakers. I feel like I may need to test the receiver's hardware at this point. I will try connecting a game console, which I know transmits by HDMI without problem and see if I can get sound from the receiver using it.
 
hakova said:
pcm2: <Intel Skylake (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play)
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Sound over HDMI requires help from the graphics driver. Have you installed one of graphics/drm-510-kmod, graphics/drm-515-kmod or graphics/drm-61-kmod (the last is recommended on 14.1, but there's still no package for it, you'd have to compile it yourself for now) and is the driver loaded (kldstat | fgrep i915kms)?

hakova said:
I am not sure if this is relevant information but the PC in question has a display port output, not HDMI. However, I am using a cable with male Display port adapter on one end and male HDMI adapter on the other. Moreover, I have video output on the monitor from the said hardware/wiring.
Click to expand...
I think a DP-to-HDMI adapter should work, at least there was a report from a user for whom it worked (https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/...el-hdmi-coffe-lake-uhd-630.91796/#post-637766).

hakova said:
I believe what I tried is identical to what you described for pipewire. I also tried vermaden's approach with pulseaudio. With pulseaudio's GUI, I can see that there is movement on Chromium's vumeter (couldn't find a better term for the bar output for the sound) on the screen but there is still no sound coming from the speakers.
Click to expand...
When diagnosing sound problems I would always first leave all the pulseaudio/pipewire fat out of the equation. You can always "play" random noise on the dsp2 audio device with a simple cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp2. You might want to lower the volume a little bit before you test this. And while we're at it: are you sure your receiver is not muted? It happens to all of us from time to time ;)
 
bsdcode said:
... And while we're at it: are you sure your receiver is not muted? It happens to all of us from time to time ;)
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Thank you very much for your detailed response. My receiver wasn't muted, but the problem was similarly simple in nature. There were two display ports on the PC, after checking the receiver hardware with the game console and confirming that it worked, I just switched the cable from one display port to the other on the PC and it worked. Thank you all so very much for your guidance, this is just an amazing forum, which never disappoints. I am sorry for taking your valuable time with my silly oversight.
 
Although this thread is now “Solved”, I noticed today that I stopped getting sound again without changing any settings. I ran through everything again with no avail. Then I thought maybe dbus was the culprit and logged off XFCE and logged back in, which solved the problem. I am not sure if it was dbus or some other XFCE service that caused the issue, but I just wanted to post it here in case somebody else experiences this in the future.
 
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