Eddie's Fancy

Finally some photos from Indrani’s Birthday trip. Keep in mind, I had the flu the entire time, so don’t expect Ansel Adams.

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I upgraded my media box to the Ubuntu Jaunty and the video and audio promptly stopped working. The video I fixed by upgrading to a new intel xorg server that’s intended for the next ubuntu release. Given that there was a fix for this issue for the previous release, I’m not sure why Jaunty didn’t include it.

Audio was a bit stickier. I have a USB to optical adapter I’ve been using for years to connect a PC to my receiver. Upgrading cleared out my configuration and I had to recreate it.

First part was getting the snd-usb-audio kernel module to load. I spend much time trying to get snd-usb-audio to load as the primary audio device but for some reason the intel driver kept getting priority. I didn’t want to modify the system too much, it makes upgrading such a hassle. I settled on this, modify /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:


alias snd-card-1 snd-usb-audio
alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1
option snd-usb-audio index=1


This will load the usb audio device in the second slot. Now, normally I create a .asoundrc file in my home directory containing this:


pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}

ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}


Which tells alsa to use the second audio device as the default one. This worked for the Ubuntu desktop, media players, and the navigation sounds in Boxee, but not for audio playing in Boxee. Much googling occurred.

Eventually, I found another alternative, asoundconf. I deleted .asoundrc, then ran asoundconf list to get the list of current audio devices, and then ran asoundconf set-default-card [device] to create a .asoundrc.asoundconf in my home directory forcing the default audio to route to the USB audio device.

Reboot, and all worked. Until the next uprade.

Finally got audio and video working again on the media box. Enough to make want to never upgrade.