I have an nForce2 board with the hardware AC3 encoder set up with KnoppMyth. I set it up around 6 months ago, and it's been working fine ever since. I only use it to record TV shows with my PVR-500, so I haven't delved into anything more complex. I just bought a DVD drive and plugged it in. Now I can play back DVDs, but I don't get any audio.

For the audio, I used the DigitalSoundHowTo and set it to ALSA:mixed-digital. As I said, it works fine with stuff coming from the PVR-500. I've never tried to watch any videos from other sources with this.

I've tried changing various settings in the "audio" tab in the Xine setup dialog, but none of them have made any difference. Nothing that I've come across while searching has presented any directions as to what options should be set in the Xine setup.

Does anyone know about configuring the Xine audio settings for the nForce2 digital audio out?

I know that there are directions on getting AC3 (keywords: SPDIF, digital output, ...) working for both TV and DVD playback both here and on the wiki. Are you remembering to click the "search for all terms" radio button? Have you tried the Google advanced search link? http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=+site:mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2&hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all

Have you searched on the Wiki? Say for example here http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=DigitalAudioHowTo, which is the first page that comes up when you search for "ac3" or "digital audio"? See the last paragraph of that page for for xine setup. Or here, http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=XineDVDHowTo, which is the first one that comes up if you search for "ac3" and "xine".

Come on people, this isn't rocket science, it's just doing a keyword search. Something that anyone who passed high school english should be able to do.

Ah, I didn't remember the wiki when I was searching, I just searched in the forums and with Google. And I was obviously using the wrong search terms because I figured there would be something nForce2 specific in the settings. I was thinking that it would be easier to get it to reencode the output decoded by Xine than to try and pass through AC3 sound.

Setting the speaker configuration to "pass through" worked fine. I can't believe it was that easy after spending several hours on it...

Can anyone help with my problem with xine and digital sound on nforce2?

I read the knoppmyth digital sound wiki and the .xine/config setting seems to be for an older version of xine. I am using xine-ui 0.99.4 with xine-lib 1.1.1.

The closest setting I could find is: "audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through"

There is nothing similar to "audio.alsa_a52_device:iec958...." that is not already commented out.

There is nothing else that's audio related that is not already commented out in the config file.

This setting works fine with dvds and files that do have ac3 sound track. However, there is no sound at all with other files that don't have ac3 sound track.

Please help, I'm stuck ...

Okay, figured it out ... the following works for both ac3 passthrough and pcm output to spdif .. i also added this info to the knoppmyth wiki ..

As before, go edit /home/mythtv/.xine/config

1.) Comment out all lines that have anything to do with audio

2.) Use the following settings:

device.alsa_front_device:plug:spdif:0

audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through