Jack detection in PulseAudio is now in Ubuntu 11.10. This means that PulseAudio will know whether you have plugged in your headphones, mic or HDMI cable, and be able to use that information. Most computers have automute already (i e, speakers mute when you plug in headphones), but this functionality is done entirely in the kernel. With PulseAudio now knowing about this, it can decide that your main volume control will adjust the headphones volume when you have headphones plugged in, and the speaker volume when you don’t.
HDMI adds one more twist to it. Due to hardware design, there are often several “false” ports accompanying the real one(s). And there is no way of knowing which one is right, except through jack detection. So you might see four different HDMI’s in the user interface, but only one is right, and with the jack detection, the right HDMI output will automatically be selected when you activate the HDMI device.
Speaking of the “Sound Preferences” user interface, I hope that we will have an improved user interface for Ubuntu 12.04, that can hide the HDMI devices that are unavailable.
(Also note that for NVidia and ATI cards, binary drivers are often needed to enable HDMI audio, as well as activating the display, through nvidia-settings or the “Displays” settings dialog.)
All of this won’t work for everyone from the start, as it will need support from the ALSA driver. However, for those who don’t have that support, things will not regress compared to the current handling. Hopefully I will be able to improve that situation for some of you in the 12.04 cycle.
Finally, a note on the upstream status of the patches needed for this functionality:
- The PulseAudio patches will hopefully be merged into PulseAudio, once PulseAudio 1.0 is out. Until then, you can grab the latest patch set here.
- A udev patch required to enable PulseAudio to read the input devices was rejected upstream.
- A kernel patch used to identify HDMI input devices is pending upstream review/approval.