Hi, I've been setting up my mythtv box and found a problem that stumped me. As a disclaimer I have little experience w/ linux, so that's half of the problem.

Right now I'm using knoppmyth 30.2 with xine setup to play both dvd and video files with passthrough enabled. My command line for playing videos is:

xine -pfhq --no-splash %s

I have a chaintech 710 setup in alsa to output audio through spdif to my reciever and it works perfectly for dvd's and videos with mp3 audio.

The problem arises when I try to playback videos with ac3 audio, including imported dvds, at which point xine gives me an error that the audio device is already in use. I've tried exiting to the command line and running xine there but I get the same thing, so it's not just a mythtv thing. The funny thing is that if I launch xine first and then open the file from within the UI I don't get the error, and the reciever detects a dolby digital signal. So it seems to be isolated to loading the file in xine from the command line which unfortunately is exactly what I need.

Is this just a xine bug? I also tried playing around with the command line options for xine without finding a fix.

In searching around for this I found some posts on another site that suggested that dmix might be the cause of this, but that's a little outside my knowledge at this point.

Any ideas?

Say, how are you doing with this? I know it's been a few days, now, did you resolve?

I am having a problem of my own with xine (loose keyboard focus after playing video...I will be posting next) and was searching for possible posts.

Anyway...you say in your posting that you did play around with xine command line options, did you try "-A alsa" ? that did the trick for me as far as sound goes.

Well, I've spent most of my time upgrading to R5B7 so I haven't been playing with xine as much recently. The problem is still there though (which makes sense seeing as the new release uses the same xine version).

I have tried the A- alsa option and it also gives the same error, so that doesn't do it. The only thing I can think of is that xine initializes the audio hardware when it first starts up and then tries to again when it sees the ac3 in the file, but it's too soon and the device reports it's busy. But if xine is already open it's already done the initialization routine and the audio is free. In any case, it seems to be localized to xine so I'll have to ask the devs about it.

I remember seeing a post about the focus issue, and I believe that answer was to recompile xine from source after commenting out a couple of lines.