HDMI output under Linux

[Xavier Bestel]

On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 17:49 +0000, Igor Mozolevsky wrote:
> On 02/01/2008, Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 17:04 +0530, JoJo jojo wrote:
> > > Wrong mailing list !
> >
> > Actually, you need support in both places -- the video driver has to
> > expose some additional functionality to the alsa driver. HDMI audio
> > capabilities depend on the video mode as the audio packets are
> > transmitted during blanking intervals, making the available bandwidth
> > for audio depend on the video mode (yikes!).
> >
> > > try here instead ...
> > > http://alsa.opensrc.org/DigitalOut
> >
> > Surely some collaboration will be necessary to get HDMI audio working
> > though. For now, the only solution is to use the existing non-HDMI audio
> > outputs.
> 
> Huh? So much for loose coupling and compartmentalization! The OS ought
> to provide abstraction to HDMI as two independent devices: one for
> video and one for audio, then it's upto the software (say, a dvd
> player) to decide how to use them. Why would you mangle audio with
> X11?..

Who said X11 ? Keith probably wants the kernel modesetting driver to
provide an alsa driver as well. A kernel driver coupled with more than 1
subsystem is common. All this happens without X11 being involved.

HTH,
	Xav