Getting HDMI audio output working in Ubuntu

Herbal Deity

I have a Dell Studio 1535 laptop running 9.10, with a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450 graphics card. HDMI video works great, I just connect to my TV and it works fine. Unfortunately, the audio doesn't seem to be working through HDMI.

HDMI is listed as an audio device:

aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: STAC92xx Analog [STAC92xx Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: ATI HDMI [ATI HDMI]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

I can make the device the default audio output (and this change seems to be reflected in alsamixer, since it toggles between saying it's off and on) using System->Preferences->Sound, but when I run `alsamixer -c1`, I can't adjust the volume, it just stays at 0 and the device is in red.

I tried what it said here: http://www.3spoken.co.uk/2009/08/how-to-get-hdmi-sound-out-of-radeon.html but it didn't work for me (and that graphics driver was kinda crap), that said, I'm not 100% confident in editing xorg.conf, and might have done something wrong.

Is there any hope?

Tillotson

Try:
`aplay -D plughw:1,3 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav`