Comment 14 for bug 25632

I can also confirm this bug in Hardy Heron. FWIW, it's also an issue in Mandriva 2008, so it's an ALSA bug not specific to Ubuntu.

It seems to be a real show-stopper with the intel8x0 driver; I have another box with a newer Asus mobo (uses the hda_intel driver) also running Myth, which I was finally able to get SPDIF working with (granted, with a a different "cheat" in .asoundrc).

Unfortunately, neither the .asoundrc above or the one from my other machine worked on this box (Abit AN8-32X) - at least when using the defaults in MythTV and Amarok. I haven't yet had the time to try these yet with all of the other options ("ALSA:plug:hw0,2", etc.).

This definitely occurs when switching from a PCM source to a Dolby Digital 5.1 source; if I try to play another PCM source, I can't unless I open up a terminal and issue this:

iecset audio 1

and the sound returns. Even if I then do:

iecset audio 0

it will still work....for a while. I often lose the sound completely, however - be it 2/3 of the way through a movie or after one or two songs - requiring the above command(s) from a terminal. This is a royal pain. I even got to the point of writing a little script to do this and ran it as a cron job every minute - but that was not acceptable either, because if it runs while sound is playing, I get a 1-2 second silent "gap".

This bug was reported two and a half years ago...'bout time it was squashed, don't you think?!?!?!