Audio through HDMI in Steam's Big Picture mode [solved]

[mani001]

Hi,

is this even possible? I have Steam installed using "steam-overlay" and it works without a glitch, but some of the games I'd rather play them on my TV , which is connected to the computer through a HDMI cable. My setup is fine for playing movies since vlc/mpv allow to choose the audio output. However, I can't find any such option inside steam. Moreover, when in "Big Picture", if I go to "Audio Device", I get the message "Audio settings unavailable. Failed to connect to audio Service." Not sure if this is even relevant since if I go to "Voice" then I can see that ALSA is present.

Anyway, anyone got this kind of setup to work (without Pulseaudio if possible)?

Cheers

[steveL]

Do you have SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa in the env?

I don't use it myself, but this came up as a tip from Naib before. Check the following post from mv.

[mani001]

Thanks for the prompt reply, steveL.

I tried that and still see the same message. However, the sound in itself is not the problem: I can hear sound both in "regular mode" and "Big picture" mode. The problem is I can't find any way to send the sound through HDMI.

[Hu]

In some configurations, HDMI sound output ends up represented as an alternate sound card. If sound works for you in general (but not to the device you want), then probably this is a general issue with ALSA's defaults differing from what you want, and fixing that may make Steam work without any Steam-specific changes. What is the output of aplay --list-devices ; aplay --list-pcm? Can you route sound from aplay (or mplayer) to HDMI with the right command line option to set a particular card? If yes, then you need an ALSA configuration file to make that routing default. I think mplayer's syntax would be mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=M.N for some integers M, N based on your devices. Note that this opens the device in exclusive mode, which may not be what you want long term.

[mani001]

Sorry for the delay (during the week I didn't get round to try this stuff)

Thanks Hu, that helped and I got it working now. For future reference, I put

[ronaldoc]

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
device 8
}

This worked for you? Hmm I guess I need to try something else

[mani001]

yes...I guess

Of course, the "card 1" and "device 8" are specific for my system. You can use the commands Hu posted above to check those values for you...or maybe vlc (you can try selecting different values from the "Audio device" list until it works).