Tip #5: Using SPDIF

If your sound card has SPDIF output you can connect your media director to the receiver via coaxial or optical cables. But first you should activate SPDIF output because by default it’s muted. Run alsamixer utility, find IEC958 mixer and unmute it by pressing ‘m’. If you don’t do it first and try to configure sound using AVWizard your media director will freeze on the DTS sound test.

There is one trick with Plutohome 2.0.0.44. It has ALSA version 1.0.12 for the ordinary kernel and 1.0.11rc2 for SMP. So, my sound card built-in to the motherboard Asus M2N was recognized with ALSA 1.0.12 but with 1.0.11rc2 alsamixer showed analog output only. LinuxMCE uses modern Ubuntu packages. So, there is not any problems with SPDIF recognizing.