HDMI + Sound + Mint 18

[electric-wildflower]

Hello everyone have a problem that i need help with.

Installed Mint 18 last night and everything works well besides HDMI sound. At first on the fresh install i changed the settings to output to HDMI and everything works well. But as soon as i restart the computer the sound will revert back to the built in audio and i have to then change it back to HDMI. and so far every restart i have had to change the settings once again.

I have also noticed every time i step away from PC and the screen saver comes on it switches back to built in audio

Is this a bug or is there anyway i can sort this out. ???

Cheers

[rene]

Pulseaudio should certainly remember the device you set it to if indeed by "changed the settings" you are referring to the device selection as available from Preferences -> Sound. Let me therefore first ask if ~/.config is owned and writeable by you -- see output of ls -ld ~/.config -- and if things improve after

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pulseaudio -k && rm -r ~/.config/pulse

Maybe you kept an old home and the new Pulseaudio has trouble with the old configuration?

I'm not yet on 18 so cannot test there but certainly on 17.x things work as expected, and independently so of any ALSA-level defaults. I've just experimented a bit and going down to said level is not expected to be at all useful; if definitely things aren't working when starting with a fresh pulse config then something is buggy. Let's for now keep it at this then...

[electric-wildflower]

Sorry for the late reply.

18 is a fresh install as in deleted my Linux petition which was along sides Windows 7 and then install in the empty space. Nothing seemed to make any difference. Literally every time i click on sound settings after a reboot, log out it will have reverted back to built in audio and the odd time i will exit sound settings and it's reverted back.

Infuriating isn't the word for it and rather interesting i was on the sound settings with hdmi chosen and as soon as i used the pulseaudio code above i noticed it quickly switched back to built in audio. ??

I'm very lost in it all as 17.3 was working completely fine no problem

.

[rene]

rather interesting i was on the sound settings with hdmi chosen and as soon as i used the pulseaudio code above i noticed it quickly switched back to built in audio. ??

Clearly Gremlins. Must be. But no, that specific part was to be expected. When you killed Pulseaudio and deleted its setup, it on the next (immediate) restart reverted to a default configuration, in which apparently your onboard audio is default. It was however hoped that from that point on you selecting HDMI as the active device would "stick" over logouts/reboots.

Note once more that I'm not running 18 and cannot verify locally. Will as such likely be leading you up the garden path but well, it's quick to test, so you can try. If you run

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cat /proc/asound/cards

you then for example see your HDMI output displayed as

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2 [HDMI           ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI HDMI
                     HDA ATI HDMI at 0xfbdfc000 irq 28

With "HDMI" in the below corresponding to the bit between [ and ], try

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echo -e 'defaults.ctl.!card HDMI\ndefaults.pcm.!card HDMI' >~/.asoundrc

to set the (control- and PCM-) ALSA-level default device for your user. Log out and back in. It should not be useful -- but then again, neither should Pulse lose its default so might as well give it a shot. If it doesn't help, simply delete ~/.asoundrc again and wait for someone running Mint 18 to try and further assist. To furthermore then not let easily found online "solutions" that also concern themselves only with ALSA-level defaults muddy the waters.

[electric-wildflower]

Thanks for the reply tried the steps you said and it made no difference so deleted ~/.asoundrc and will have to wait for someone with knowledge on 18 to figure it out thanks again will just have to keep switching it back for the time been.

Tried removing pulse audio completely and then re install it but that made no difference lol

[barmak]

Dear all,

I have nearly the same problem: with Mint 17.3 my HDMI sound was perfect. When I updated to Mint 18, the sound disappeared .....

I appreciate any hints.

Barmak

[Hmmmmm]

I have exactly the same problem on a clean install of LM 18 on my Gateway 5927. Watching video with HDMI the screen will go black, move a mouse and video comes back uninterrupted but sound reverts from HDMI to system speakers.

[rene]

As long as no specific Mint 18 advice is available; a workaround for at least the original poster could be to reorder the card indices. Both his onboard audio and HDMI output no doubt use snd-hda-intel whereby such is not fully straightforward either, but so as to here set my HDMI to be card 0 and my onboard audio to be card 1 it works to

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sudo sh -c "echo options snd-hda-intel index=1,0 >/etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.conf"

and reboot. Slightly unclean, this gives the by snd-hda-intel first "detected" card index 1 and the second index 0. Unclean in the sense of said order being poorly specified to begin with -- but works for me, and probably works for you. After reboot check /proc/asound/cards for the ordering. The idea is that Pulseaudio might be reverting to "card 0" in the original poster's situation and having HDMI be card 0 would then be effective -- although I do not in fact expect such. Why would it? There's the issue though that things worked on 17.3 whereby we might after all be looking at a silly bug like that rather than something more involved.

"Hmmmmm" issue just above might be more involved and "barmak's" problem could literally be anything.

[Hmmmmm]

Video on youtube plays flawlessly the time-out problem happens when watching HBOnow I had to install pipelight to access HBO. I would think the audio should hold my selection of HDMI 5.1 as default instead of reverting back to system speakers.
Audio worked fine in LM 17.3 . My screensaver is set to never.

[electric-wildflower]

I completely forgot to mention that there is two monitors connected to the on board ports on my PC

1. Display port (with a little converter connected to convert to HDMI which is connected via a HDMI cable)
2. VGA

And now the problem has changed to the point every so many mins and the sound will just drop back to on board regardless of what i am doing.

[sikejsudjek]

Does installing Caffeine help ? That should prevent the screen timing out in full screen mode, which may in turn prevent the hdmi going into sleep mode (if that's what's causing it ?).

[electric-wildflower]

Solved it i tried reinstalling a fresh copy and everything seems to be working fine after installing all the updates. Not sure what actually caused it but might of been just a bug that appeared when installed.

[Leroy1908]

I found this thread while searching because of the same issue: Mint 18 x64 and the default sound output reverts back to analog speakers on my laptop - even though it is connected via HDMI all the time.

I can go into Pulse Audio and change it (set fallback) to HDMI 5.1 and it works fine, yet on reboot it always starts up using the speakers.

For the record this was a clean install and I have all updates - so while the OP may have fixed it for himself, it appears this behavior still exists for some. I did not attempt the suggested command line fix to switch device index as I am a newbie and wouldn't know how to undo that if it FUBARs.

[superchill11]

I have the same issue with a fresh install of Mint 18 on my laptop. After resume from suspend, the audio switches back to the laptop speakers rather than staying on HDMI. Also, is there a way to get the audio output to change to HDMI when the display is changed to External Display? I found this link:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/UpgradingAlsa/DKMS

but I am not sure if this will install the ALSA driver from 17.3=Ubuntu 14.04. In 17.3 the audio function worked perfectly. I think this is a bug somewhere and hopefully it gets fixed soon.

[Leroy1908]

As followup, I've been using Hibernate mode as a workaround. If you press the power button on the laptop and get the lid closed before boot, the system will resume with HDMI still output. Standby doesn't work for this purpose.

Additionally, hibernate is not without it's issues too (occasionally locks up or boots into odd states). It sure would be nice if the original issue of always reverting to onboard speakers could be fixed...

[hatalar205]

Same problem. This is very annoying.

[turkka]

It seems that changing the display resolution reverts sound back from HDMI to Built-in speakers too. This on a Lenovo Thinkpad 410, with Intel HD graphics and a Displayport to HDMI-adapter with Mint 18. Have to check later when I have more time whether it happens with NVidia too and Mint 17.3.

Log just shows that:

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[  497.744513] [drm:intel_pch_fifo_underrun_irq_handler [i915]] *ERROR* PCH transcoder A FIFO underrun

on each resolution change. And every time sound device changes back to Built-in speakers.

So there seems to be more than just the PulseAudio involved?

Edit: Same behaviour on NVidia NVS 3100M too.

[wewa]

Yes. I have this exact problem too.

Fix please.

[wewa]

Yes. I have this exact problem too.
Fix please.

[wewa]

Same problem. This is very annoying.

Yes. I have this exact problem too.
Fix please.