I just discovered what’s wrong with my HDMI audio! It turns out that my monitor, a Samsung SyncMaster TA550, blocked the audio.

To get a decent video display, one has to name the HDMI as “PC” or “DVI PC”. I chose the later as somebody suggested. Unfortunately, with this name it seems the HDMI audio is disabled. Once I changed the name to “PC”, both video and audio are working!

Best Regards,
James

You might have disabled the internal sound card (Intel Azalia) in the BIOS settings. Maybe that’s why the digital audio is not working.

Please run aplay -l and see if you have the “ALC888″ device:

card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]

For mplayer, you need to use “plughw” instead of just “hw” in the device string like that:
mplayer -ao alsa:device=plughw=0.3

(this is the setting for HDMI with Azalia audio disabled. The digital output is plughw=0.1 for me, when I enable the Azalia device)

To make this setting permanent, open the file .mplayer/config in your homefolder and add a line like the following:

ao=alsa:device=plughw=0.3

HTH,
fronk

Thanks,
Ramit

P.S. Using Debian squeeze.

Unfortunately I did not succeed. My kernel is 2.6.38-11-generic, the ALSA version is v1.0.24.2. The Catalyst driver was activated. The onboard sound card was disabled. S/PDIF is unmuted.
aplay -l returns
—————————————————————————
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
—————————————————————————

I’m confused about the card info. In your case it is HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI] but mine is “Generic”. Is there something missing?

I found two web pages saying the HDMI audio is by default disabled and has to be re-enabled:
(1) https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonHD#HDMI_Audio (by editing xorg.conf).
(2) https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=124130 ( by editing menu.lst)

However, adding a Device section to xorg.conf as below caused a booting problem (display froze at the “UBUNTU” screen).
——————————————————————
Section “Device”
Option “Audio” “true”
Option “HDMI” “all”
EndSection
——————————————————————
Appending “radeon.audio=1″ to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”…” line in /etc/default/grub, which I think is equivalent to revising the menu.lst file, does not make any difference. The resultant grub.cfg file has a corresponding line like this:

linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38-11-generic root=UUID=62004961-924f-476e-be42-5f57a0657363 ro quiet splash radeon.audio=1 vt.handoff=7

I also added the following line to /etc/pulse/default.pa:
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,3 sink_name=Generic

So I’m basically running out of idea.

Regards,

James

I am using the Catalyst driver. The exact version is 8.841.
But I am not using a display manager, just running Xorg (1.7.7) with my own xinit script. So I have no experience with user-switching.
I couldn’t find reliable information, but AFAIK gdm’s user-switching attaches a new X-display to another virtual terminal, so maybe the Catalyst driver doesn’t support that or the acutal switch to the other virtual terminal.
Maybe I’ll try this out sometime.

As for the sound issue, just try my solution, and disable the onboard sound card. If you wish to use pulseaudio (the default in Ubuntu), you might still have to tweak some settings there. But I think I recall having it work with pulseaudio a while ago.

HTH,

fronk

I would like to know whether you are using the open source drivers or the Catalyst driver?

I bought an AD02 recently and installed Ubuntu 11.04 (64bit) on it. There are two problems:
(1) There was a black screen when I switch user until I removed the Catalyst driver.
(2) There is no HDMI sound. I’ll try your solution.