Hi, I am testing a lot the sound. This was something I was able to set correctly in 10.3, somehow, don’t ask me how, I couldn’t remember the second I did it, so rotfl!.
Oh God, what a pain again in 11.2. I find that setting the most complex and time consuming I have ever heard of. People debugging kernel panics say those panic bugs are the hardest to debug. I think they would rank setting up AC3 passthrough SPDIF second. 
My card now works with M3. I have 2 backends, GStreamer and Xine. I have installed all the codecs, liba52, ac3, flac, ffmpeg, codecs-kde, win32codecs, libdvdcss, libdvdread, libdvdsomething, everything.
My goal is to setup sound AC3 passthrough SPDIF, or if you prefer to send out surround5.1 through SPDIF connection (optical in my case).
Well, I know my codecs and libs are working, cuz using a .avi file extracted in DVM/AC3 surround5.1, if I type this from command line:
mplayer ~/ac3spdiftest_movie.avi -ao alsa:device=spdif -ac hwac3
it works! I get 5.1 surround through SPDIF. Now good luck to get that from SMplayer and Kaffeine.
Mplayer itself I couldn’t succeed. With SMplayer, I found that only OSS was working and when enabling the function to passthrough AC3, every time I play an AC3 movie I get an error message that cannot be solved. So I try Kaffeine 0.9.1. Oops, there is no settings anymore!! 0.8.8 has settings for the backend, but not 0.9.1. So I cannot tell Kaffeine what to do. I went into the multimedia settings of Configure Desktop to set the Xine backend but there is nothing on how to passthrough AC3. VLC. Yeah VLC. Cannot install yet in 11.2 due to dependencies I cannot solve. I will try to compile from source.
So I am on a dead end. Alsa people won’t help, as from command line everything works fine. I just need to find out how to pass on that command to a video player using gui.
Has any one started to test that as well? I mean how can you play your DVDs in surround if that doesn’t work? :
tnx