How to get HDMI sound out of a Radeon Device in Ubuntu Karmic

After much searching of the Interweb I've managed to get sound out of my TV when connected to my Acer Aspire 5536 via HDMI.

It turns out that Ubuntu Karmic has full support on the Audio side for the sound part of the RS780 chipset. Pulseaudio picks it up and the new volume control lets you select the output effortlessly.

Unfortunately the Radeon Video driver that Ubuntu uses by default doesn't support 'HDMI Sound pass through', so the bits never get to the TV.

Fortunately there another Radeon driver - 'radeonhd' and that does have HDMI sound support, but it doesn't detect it automatically so you have to configure it in the good old 'xorg.conf'.

To get the driver, first make sure you have the 'universe' repository activated and then install the driver via apt.

apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd

and then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to add in the following:

Section "Device"
      Identifier      "ATI Radeon HD 3200/RS780"
      Driver          "radeonhd"
      Option          "DRI" "On"
      Option          "Audio" "On"
      Option          "HDMI"  "all"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
      Mode 0666
EndSection

(Change the Identifier as required so that it ties in with the rest of the configuration).

The DRI Option activated direct rendering, which again doesn't active by default for certain chipsets. The DRI section allows non-privileged commands to access direct rendering.

Details of the options and default are on the radionhd manual page that is installed alongside the driver.

Making Wine sound work with PulseAudio on Ubuntu - properly

Wine sounds in Ubuntu has had a problem for a while now since they introduced to PulseAudio sound server. There are a lot of kludgy workarounds on the Internet that will get the sound working for one particular application, but the side effect is that it stops it working for everything else. And you lose pulseaudio's ability to move sound streams between sound cards and sound servers.

There is a way of fixing it properly, and that is to run a version of Wine with a native Pulseaudio driver installed. The code exists, but due to the politics of Open Source it hasn't been included in the main upstream codebase.

Since I can't stand kludgy workarounds I decided to take it upon myself to create a wine package with the pulseaudio driver in place and now that is available on my PPA.

It is targeted at the Karmic Koala release, which contains the required version of PulseAudio. Can I ask all those currently testing the new Ubuntu release to try out the package and see if it improves matter for you. Everybody else will have to wait until October :)

If you do try out the software can you report back your experiences in Launchpad

https://bugs.launchpad.net/wine/+bug/371897

The more data we collect, the more evidence we have that this should be included in Ubuntu as standard. And of course if you have problems I can work with upstream to get them sorted.

You can install the software from my PPA

https://launchpad.net/~neil-aldur/+archive/ppa

To install the software follow the instructions on Launchpad (https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA/InstallingSoftware)

Read more about the Winepulse patches and why they're not in the mainline