I'm running audio over HDMI to my receiver, which has a full 7.1 setup connected to it. However, most of the stuff that I listen to has far fewer channels—some is mono, most is stereo, a bit is 5.1. When the receiver is fed with the right number of channels, it has various DSP effects which work fairly well (e.g. in splitting out a center channel, in sending base to the subwoofer, auto-detecting Dolby matrix surround, etc.). This ceases working if you send it a full 7.1 signal with a bunch of silent channels.
The number of output channels in PulseAudio is configured, per-card/sink, by the profile assigned to the card. You can change the assigned profile with pacmd
, pactl
, and various GUI programs.
How can I set it up to automatically change the profile based on the channel usage in the input stream(s)? E.g., if the input streams are only using front-left and front-right, switch to the stereo profile. If they're using back-left and back-right as well, switch to quadrophonic, etc.
mediainfo
orffmpeg
oravconv
) and then usepacmd
to select the appropriate profile prior to launching your player, From a logical standpoint I would expect it to work provided you were playing one audio at a time.