hab136's Journal: Chaintech AV710 and 5.1 sound through the optical port

I have a Chaintech AV710
http://www.chaintech.com.tw/tw/eng/product_spec.asp?MPSNo=16&PISNo=199

It's currently $24.50 at Newegg
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16829120103

It's about the cheapest card I could find at the time that had an optical out, and it's supported by Linux.

It uses the ENVY-24-HTS chipset, which in the Linux kernel is:

Device Drivers
-Sound
--ALSA
---PCI Devices
----ICE/VT1724/1720 (Envy24HT/PT)

The config files I have are listed as other journal entries.

Some big problems I had:
1. Unmuting the darn thing. Hence I have included my asound.state after I mucked with amixer for forever.
2. Xine and Ogle both need config changes to output to the correct ALSA device. See config files for both.
3. (Once they produce sound) xine and ogle (both excellent players) will automatically use the 5.1 track (or you can select it through the DVD menu). With mplayer it's harder..

For mplayer, as far as I can tell:
# midentify VTS_02_1.VOB
ID_VIDEO_ID=0
ID_AUDIO_ID=129
ID_AUDIO_ID=128
ID_AUDIO_ID=130
ID_AUDIO_ID=131
ID_AUDIO_ID=132
ID_AUDIO_ID=133
ID_AUDIO_ID=134
ID_FILENAME="VTS_02_1.VOB"
ID_VIDEO_FORMAT=0x10000002
ID_VIDEO_BITRATE=9800000
[...]

All we care about are the ID_AUDIO_IDs. Notice they start at 129.

Now look at lsdvd -a:
# lsdvd -a .
Disc Title: unknown
Title: 01, Length: 02:19:02 Chapters: 37, Cells: 59, Audio streams: 07, Subpictures: 02
                Audio: 1, Language: en - English, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 2, AP: 0, Content: Undefined
                Audio: 2, Language: en - English, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 6, AP: 0, Content: Undefined
                Audio: 3, Language: fr - Francais, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 2, AP: 0, Content: Undefined
                Audio: 4, Language: en - English, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 2, AP: 0, Content: Undefined
                Audio: 5, Language: en - English, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 2, AP: 0, Content: Undefined
                Audio: 6, Language: en - English, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 2, AP: 0, Content: Undefined
                Audio: 7, Language: en - English, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 2, AP: 0, Content: Undefined

Title: 02, Length: 00:00:00 Chapters: 18, Cells: 01, Audio streams: 01, Subpictures: 01
                Audio: 1, Language: xx - Unknown, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 6, AP: 0, Content: Undefined

Title: 03, Length: 00:00:00 Chapters: 17, Cells: 01, Audio streams: 01, Subpictures: 01
                Audio: 1, Language: xx - Unknown, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 6, AP: 0, Content: Undefined

Title: 04, Length: 00:00:07 Chapters: 02, Cells: 01, Audio streams: 00, Subpictures: 00

Title: 05, Length: 00:00:00 Chapters: 01, Cells: 01, Audio streams: 00, Subpictures: 00

Title: 06, Length: 00:00:17 Chapters: 02, Cells: 01, Audio streams: 01, Subpictures: 00
                Audio: 1, Language: en - English, Format: ac3, Frequency: 48000, Quantization: drc, Channels: 6, AP: 0, Content: Undefined

Longest track: 1

-------

Title 01 is obviously the main movie. Audio track 1 (129) is 2 channel. Audio track 2 (130) is 6 channel (actually 5.1). That's the one we want.
So, to specify the audio stream:

mplayer -aid 130

From `man mplayer`:
-aid (also see -alang)
  Select audio channel (MPEG: 0-31, AVI/OGM: 1-99, ASF/RM: 0-127, VOB(AC3): 128-159, VOB(LPCM): 160-191,
  MPEG-TS 17-8190). MPlayer prints the available IDs when run in verbose (-v) mode. When playing an MPEG-
  TS stream, MPlayer/MEncoder will use the first program (if present) with the chosen audio stream.

-alang (also see -aid)
  Play the audio stream whose language matches the given code. Different container formats employ differ-
  ent language codes. DVDs use ISO 639-1 two letter language codes, Matroska and NUT use ISO 639-2 three
  letter language codes while OGM uses a free-form identifier. MPlayer prints a list of available lan-
  guages when run in verbose (-v) mode.

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Seriously, don't use mplayer for DVDs. Use ogle or xine, and you get DVD menus to boot. For full-screen, no gui mode:

ogle -u cli ${DVDDIR}

xine dvd:/${DVDDIR} --fullscreen --hide-gui --no-logo