Hi all,
I recently won an USFF Dell Optiplex 7020 for cheap on ebay. I bought it in hopes that I could replace my big fat Ryzen 1500x PC that doesn’t fit in my TV console.
The big hitch though, is that I didn’t want to use Windows on it, because honestly, fuck windows. I wanted to use my favourite linux distro, Fedora! *tip tip*
Why is this a hitch, if it’s my favourite distro? Well, little did I know that audio over HDMI isn’t gonna Todd Howard its way in and ‘just work’. Oooooh no… This fucking thing had other plans…
The only audio that would work was the integrated speaker. I tried different DP cables, an expensive 8k 120hz capable DP to HDMI cable, nada… I even went out and bought a native HDMI port expansion board for this USFF so that I could rule out any issues caused by a DP to HDMI converter… nada…
I tried a heap of different threads online on fucking around with Alsa, checking sound devices, trying to sound test directly to the sound devices, etc. and nothing worked. What worked? Well, thanks to Marko in this thread, who suggested kitchen-sinking all of the firmware packages and giving it a reboot. After doing that, I could suddenly fucking hear out of my TV!
So here is in-detail what I did:
Replace this file:
nano /usr/share/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/alsa-vm.conf
With this contents:
monitor.alsa.rules = [
{
matches = [
{ node.name = "~alsa_output.*" }
]
actions = {
update-props = {
audio.format = "S16LE"
audio.channels = 2
audio.position = "FL,FR"
}
}
}
]
Then run this:
dnf install alsa-firmware alsa-sof-firmware alsa-tools-firmware intel-audio-firmware
Then, restart your computer and hope…