Version: (using Devel) Compiler: gcc-4.1.2 OS: Linux Installed from: Compiled sources I can't have Dolby Digital sound when watching an AC3 movie with Phonon. I seems to have some kind of software downmixing. Dolby Digital works well with Xine.
Somebody working on it? I'd like to watch my Dolby Digital movies correctly...
Still happening... Sounds like nobody cares that an high tech desktop environment isn't even able to playback Dolby Digital streams........
hi! not a kde developer, but this might help you (if you havn't already tried), I filed a bug report with something similar (Bug 189033), all you have to do is: nano .config/kde-org/Phonon-Xine.xine.conf and add audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through (assuming that you have a digital decoder, or any kind of reciever)
Yes, I've seen this recently, but thanks to you anyways. That being said, passtrough might be activated by default, or Phonon devs should add an option for this. It's a shame that an hi-tech desktop environement like KDE4 doesn't have support for digital passthrough without editing a configuration file by hand.
Adding this to the wishlist.
As far as I'm aware this is not yet (easily) possible with Phonon, but it will be eventually supported. There is a workaround that I personally use and am happy with (tho' not all users will be) so I've documented it on my blog: http://colin.guthr.ie/2010/12/bobby-digital-in-5-1-surround/ This basically gives me a permanent 5.1 digital output that can be used by any audio producing application. The App has to take care of decoding the audio to separate PCM streams and then passes it to PA which will reencode it back to a AC3 stream and push it out via S/PDIF to your receiver. It's not perfect but it may make for an acceptable work around until passthrough is more gracefully handled. Hope that helps.
Personnaly, I don't need software upmixing with my amplifier. All most S/PDIF users need is a checkbox to enable passthrough. I am no coder, but I don't think it's really hard to add a checkbox which adds/removes/changes an option to a single config file...
That config file refers to one single backend implementation and is in no way generic. There would have to be a way to pass through the information via a standard API of some kind that could be interpreted by all backends so they could act uniformly. So it's not totally trivial. This could be exposed in Xine specific config but as Xine is a dead platform and no one is working on it, I doubt very much it'll receive much attention.
Dolby Digital with S/PDIF out in Kaffeine 1.2.2 doesn't still work :-( I activated the checkboxes with AC3 and so, and with DVB-S all channels with AC3 support doesn't work, no Dolby Digital with S/PDIF work.
@paderman: What checkboxes are you referring to? The ones in pavucontrol perhaps? If so this will only work with PulseAudio clients which use the new API to start streams and AFAIK, only the gstreamer backend with an up-to-date gstreamer install will do this currently (and I'm not even 100% sure this will work via a phonon wrapper - I know raw gstreamer can do it.). Can you confirm what kind of setup you have? Failing the passthrough support, you can use instead an AC3 encoder setup that I outline here: http://colin.guthr.ie/2010/12/bobby-digital-in-5-1-surround/. This will work for any source and encode it to 5.1 for sending to your receiver. There is also now an equivalent DTS version too which seems to be a bit cleaner in terms of it's implementation. I've been using that latter one for a while with very nice results. It does mean it's decoded and re-encoded which is annoying but if passthrough doesn't work this is the 2nd best option.
*** Bug 286914 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***