S/PDIF ac3-passthrough problem

[Mark Lehrer <mark@knm.org>]

Hello there.  I have been having a weird problem for the past few
months, and I think I am going to have to dive into source code to
figure it out.  The problem: mplayer can play digital audio through
the S/PDIF connector, but VLC and Mythtv cannot.  Here is the error
from VLC:

[00000311] a52 decoder: A/52 channels:6 samplerate:48000 bitrate:448000
[00000314] alsa audio output error: internal: can't find audio-device (10)

Could someone please help me to decipher this error a bit?  VLC has a
device auto-detect, and it set the output device to hw:0,1.  aplay says
that this is a:

card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: AD198x Digital [AD198x Digital]

I have tried every S/PDIF howto I could find, including multiple
asouncrc files.  The weirdest part is: if I take the hard drive out
and put it in my other system (Intel P4 based - too slow to use), the
S/PDIF works perfectly in all applications.  I guess my first questions
are:

1) what device is alsa trying to access?  could i be missing something
   under /dev/dvb?

2) What is different about how mplayer and VLC send AC3 sound to
   the sound device?

Thanks,
Mark



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