Is it possible to automatically switch to HDMI sound output? 13.04
I've seen a few similar questions however couldn't find a solution and they were all a few years old.
When I plug my laptop into the TV HDMI port I have to manually go through the sound options and select HDMI to get the sound to play through the TV. Is there a way to make it switch automatically on connection?
thanks
Solution 1:
It is not as easy as it looks at first sight to acchieve this. See the discussion below for reasons why it is in fact rather complicated:
- Disucssion on implementing pulseaudio auto-switching of audio devices
The existing modules module-switch-on-connect, and module-switch-on-port-available will not work consistently with HDMI.
At present there is much effort being done to implement a priority list feature which will let us define the priority of an audio device for pulseaudio to route to it (or not):
- Pulseaudio priority routing
Until this will be generally available in a future release of PulseAudio we have not much more choice than manually switching the audio output sink whenever we connect to a HDMI audio device.
To make life easier in case we often have to switch our output devices we may consider writing a small script to enable toggling between two output sinks. See these questions for a start:
- How to change pulseaudio sink with "pacmd set-default-sink" during playback?
- How can I change the default audio device from command line?
Solution 2:
I wrote an indicator applet that lets you switch the sound output.
As long as the problem is not solved, this applet is probably a bit more comfortable.
I'm using 12.04. Please let me know if you tried it successfully.
https://github.com/lkettenb/sound-output-switcher
Screentshot:
Solution 3:
For Gnome Shell users, the Sound Output Device Chooser is a practical consolation, as long as there is no solution for auto-switching. This has been working well for me with Gnome Shell 3.14 and 3.16 so far.