Sound via encoded HDMI does not work anymore

[Frederikkb]

Hi,

I love vlc and since years play all my videos with this program. Unfortunately since a few weeks, I can not play sound via encoded HDMI output anymore. I am not sure whether these problems came with the update to OSX 10.8 (now 10.8.2) or earlier, but the other setup (vlc 2.05, Denon amp, cable, HDMI adapter, Macbook Pro early 2010 etc.) stayed the same. Normal HDMI audio output works but with bad quality. I already tried dozens of videos and I already used your nightly versions and older versions as well. I also find some forum messages but did not find a solution that helped with my problem.

I would be very happy if I could make it work again and thank you for your help.

Greetings
Frederik

[gg74]

I have a similar problem, I've just upgraded my old 2006 mac mini to a new 2012 model, and now I'm using HDMI instead of SPDIF to connect to my amp.

VLC does not passthrough the audio but it converts it to a 5.1 PCM, the problem is that it uses the wrong channel position, so I get the speech from the left surround speaker and the right channel from the subwoofer... this cause obviously a very bad audio quality

I think this should be fixable in some way, but the right solution should be to have a working passthrough mode, and let the receiver decode DTS/AC3 as with SPDIF audio.

Sadly I cannot give you a solution. Plex supports HDMI passthrough, but I don't like it.

EDIT: I've found an interesting post here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1314744

It seems that using the "Audio MIDI Tool" is the way to go both to enable passthrough and to change the channel setup, the utility include a tool to select the position of each channel. I've not yet tried it because I'm at work but I'll try tonight

[fkuehne]

@gg74: This is a known problem in VLC 2.0.x. It will be fixed in VLC 2.1, which will be out later this spring. However, you can already take a look at a Nightly Build of VLC to check for the current progress. This issue is already resolved, but more testing would be welcome!

[larryy]

I'm not sure VLC can fix the problem entirely on its own. I have successfully got everything from 1.1.12 to 2.0.5 to work using the solution written up here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1314744
HTH.