I recently installed Manjaro on my HTPC because I wanted to give Arch Linux a try and so far pretty much everything works flawlessly.
I was able to achieve proper 5.1 by disabling all passthrough formats in Plex and choosing 5.1 inside the Pulseaudio control panel.
The only problem with this is that Pulseaudio will output everything in 5.1 - even stereo sources (which sounds horrible).
No big deal I thought - just set Pulseaudio to stereo and enable passthrough for DTS and AC3 in the control panel. The only problem with this solution is that it doesn’t work. Upon enabling DTS/AC3 inside Plex I will only receive a fast forward picture with no audio.
Plan B was using ALSA directly with export AE_ENGINE=SOFT but with ALSA I don’t get any sound at all no matter which device I choose.
I also tried manually choosing the correct card & device in the ALSA configuration file but still no success. While choosing HDA ATI HDMI will give me a normal speed video I do not get any sound after all.
Here is the relevant aplay -l output:
card 0: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
My HTPC uses an AMD APU and a Gigabyte mainboard with two HDMI connections (I did try both).
I use the proprietary driver as any other driver will result in a blackscreen on AMD APUs.
Just tell me if you need any more information.
