JMComputer's Blog

Starting my new home theater January 22, 2011

So I’m a little late to talk about holidays, but I did want to throw this out there. The holidays are always a fun time, between watching my oldest son unwrapping his gifts and looking up to me saying “Batteries daddy, fix it” to having the family together and having dinner and laughing. This past holiday gave me a great surprise. I received a 42″ LCD HDTV, and let me tell you, it ROCKS! Shortly after getting it unloaded from the box and place way up on top of what we are using as an entertainment center, I was already thinking of possibilities of what to hook up to it.

Of course, the first thing in my mind is my laptop, which has a convenient HDMI out on the side. “This is going to be GREAT!” if my first thought of course. Hulu, Youtube, and of course some of my games on a bright, wonderful high definition screen, larger than life! (Compared to the 15.4″ screen on the laptop) So, I go down to a local electronics store and grab an 7m. HDMI for less than $10, hooked it up to the TV, and got a gorgeous 1080p desktop! Only complaint at first was that the drawing speed was a little slow, when you move the mouse around, it takes about half a second to update on the TV. I set my audio over to use the HDMI out instead of the onboard sound card, tested with Amarok, and looks and sounds great. Then I decide to pull up Hulu in Firefox, start up a clip, and now is where I get a huge surprise.

The audio from Firefox ended up playing through the onboard speakers rather than through the TV! Now this isn’t right, I checked ALSA config, KDE’s sound system settings, and even KDE’s mixer to make sure nothing was muted or anything. Everything’s checking out okay. Now I’m really confused. After some searching, I find several threads where people were successful getting Firefox audio through the HDMI, but every one of those solutions involved altering the ALSA configuration to bridge or pipe the sound through Pulse Audio, and Pulse Audio ends up passing the audio through the HDMI channel. Well wouldn’t it figure? I had dumped Pulse Audio because of the audio issues generated by Pulse Audio in some of the games I play in Wine. So without using Pulse Audio, I am unsure how to get the audio from Firefox through the HDMI channels.

If anyone would care to give hints or anything, please feel free to leave a comment or a link to a solution.