Comment 16 for bug 25632

On intrepid. I have a lot of trouble with audio and video also.
I have 3 desktops and one notebook, all amd64 platforms.

Situation with nvidia/alc861/nforce6:
On hardy, USB mouse/keyboard combo would not work. Fuddling with xorg didn't improve it.
 Audio would work o.k. after manuall "sudo apt-get install module-assistant" and "m-a a-i alsa"
After dist-upgrade to intrepid: passthrough works in kaffeine/vlc but not in mythtv. No matter if with/wo vsync on, video tearing is noticable. Will try the .asoundrc, because my normal pcm spdif out seems gone too.
Neither nvidia drivers nor alsa will install manually :-(
alsamixer shows either only one bar for pulse or with -c0 option shows not all jacks correctly

Situation with "brand new" phenom/ati hd3200/sb700 board with ALC889: switching between dig 2.0 and 5.1 works like a charm, but video teared and needs a lot of fusing in the xorg.conf. Chip is not correctly detected, alsamixer shows wrong jacks and no 2ch/6ch switch option

Situation with older notebook, that has neither spdif and only 2.0: no probs never ever, alsamixer shows jacks ok

On old pentiumIII notebook: perfect 2.0

On nvidia board with alc 865 (?) at least neither 861 nor 889: all good, spdif for lack of bracket never tried.

My conclusion: as always, linux works best on elder hardware. unfortunately, i gave the old stuff all away to people without computer at all. I remember gutsy etc. used to run fine on e.g. some duron1400-platform. I know the realtek stuff sucks, but on the other hand: I don't need a "real" soundcard, when I don't record myself and only output digital to digital amp, so I hope alsa will improve to make it easier to chose.
If one of the alsa developers stumbles over how the audio config in vista looks for the amd700/800 chipset with rt889-audio, where everything can be simply combined even into dts..
No of course, in linux must be without patented bullshit, but it's a USABILITY example...)

Please include better diagnostic tools - the "audio" in "System" in ubuntu should provide a way to catch all relevant stuff in one click to see what's missing!