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Hello all,
First timer here. Hope you can bear with me.
I'm in charge of an old friend's computer. Both the friend and the computer are old so...
Now, the computer is a 32bit Athlon XP, can't be upgraded, can't be replaced. Installed Q4OS 4.11 alongside Windows XP Pro because of a printer driver incompatibility with XP but that's another discussion. Q4OS has been behaving decently so far with one exception: the soundcard - of which my friend is very proud and can't replace either - wouldn't yield any sound on analog output in the media players I tested so far - with the exception of VLC.
Thanks to a tip from another friend of mine I found out that the S/PDIF switch in the settings would be the culprit. And as it turned out it is a very old issue.
The links I have been referred to can't be posted because this board is too anal, so any relevant information there would have to be researched by any poor soul that might want to help. Thank you so much forum admins for that! (not)
Anyway, those links all deal with this card having problems with the output. Some have solved it in the past by manually flipping the switch but it appears recent players - or the OS itself, through the kernel or not - trigger that switch automatically either with an incomplete or a wrong command.
What I have tested so far are:
- SMPlayer with both mpv and mplayer as engines
- mpv standalone
- mplayer standalone with its default GUI
All of them somehow force continuously the S/PDIF switch to on, and with it another switch related to optical raw output. Neither of the two can be disabled while playing a video file, they only revert to the default off state when playback is paused or stopped.
However, VLC when set to force S/PDIF output would correctly yield the sound to analog outputs, whch means the switch is still in a reversed state but somehow VLC can correctly trigger its state, while other players cannot. This definitely removes any doubt about the functional state of the soundcard or anything related to it. It does work correctly in Windows XP too with its official drivers.
It should be noted - whether relevant or not - that VLC does not trigger the second optical raw output switch together with the S/PDIF.
At this point I have no idea whose fault this really is, and more importantly how to permanently fix this issue so that players other than VLC - which I personally dislike - could be used for video playback with sound working. I should mention that the card is usually set to 6.1 output (yes, it's 6.1 - not 5.1 nor 7.1!) and the owner does have a matching sound system.
Question is whether anyone here has some relevant info on this issue and any possible fix, considering the limited hardware. I'd be willing to try anything within reason to make this work. Thank you in advance.
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Actually after further documentation on the web I found out it's a non-ZS Audigy 2 SB0240. Not that it makes any difference in regard to the issue.
Today installed the Xine player and its behavior is exactly the same as with mpv/mplayer/SMPlayer. Either all these players are utterly defective or there's an unfixed bug in the kernel. But really, nobody knows what to do, like even manually recompiling the kernel or something...? Current kernel is 5.10.0-21-686-pae.
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