Recently decided to move from an old speaker setup to a spare sound bar I have around. The soundbar is 5.1 with wireless rear speakers and wireless sub. Im connected with spdif (optical) and am able to get sound however the only profiles that exist are stereo. Is there a way to get 5.1 to work over optical in pulse or should I just go back to my old logitech speakers analog setup?
After running into this issue it reminded me of years ago when I ripped pulse out (when it was first added) because it broke my 5.1 optical setup I had working through a receiver using ALSA. I remember spending months trying to get it working with pulse and never getting it to work without falling back to ALSA. I had hoped the profiles and configuration of pulse had been updated since then (probably back in 2010 maybe earlier) but im not finding much info of success with it. Has anyone had luck getting 5.1 to work over spdif?
Select appropriate IEC958 device for output. You need 5.1-capable audio chip for 5.1 output.
Use alsamixer
to set up audio cards (and turn on optical output).
Now openSUSE can use
Pipewire only
PulseAudio only
Pipewire + PulseAudio together
You can use HDMI/DP to output 5.1/6.1/7.1 audio to receiver.
Ive installed the dcaenc along with the dcaenc pipewire plugins tried various configs asound configs do not exist since alsa is not the sound provider. I was hoping the ecosystem had gotten better in the past 10+ years since I last tried to get it working, but that doesnt appear to be the case which is disappointing. With pure alsa I had this setup and working fairly simply… its just frustrating but I guess noone really uses spdif so theres no push to make it better.
@Svyatko I cant use hdmi/dp as its a sound bar not a receiver, so it cant also pass the signal back to the montior. Also tried using my unused hdmi to plug in, but opensuse tries to see it as a monitor and it didnt really work. Looks like for now moving back to analog is going to be the best option.