[x86-64 - legacy] No HDMI sound with Nvidia ION

    Hi, so I've tried to update my old installation of LibreElec 5 to the latest LibreELEC-Generic-legacy.x86_64-12.0.2, and then tried downgrading to LibreELEC-Generic-legacy.x86_64-11.0.6, but can't get HDMI sound working with Nvidia ION GPU on both :(

    With an ancient version of LE5, all was fine. I found a few threads here and on GitHub, but all was without any suggestions or workaround.

    One thread on Nvidia website was saying that they've found the root cause and it is fixed in the next release, which is a long time ago, but again with no details.

    Is there anything I can try? Do someone else have a similar experience?


    The mainboard is this one https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-at3n7a-i

    with Nvidia MCP7A-ION (Nvidia ION) chipset, this is audio chipset: VIA VT1708S (Vinyl HD High Definition Audio), but I think the problem is with the Nvidia driver or so :(

    I've seen a handful of reports of no audio with Atom/ION devices in the last two years, but I was never able to replicate them with an Xtreamer Ultra2 board (the only ION thing I have) and in LE12 we're using the latest/laste nVidia driver available; which is dropped from the LE13 codebase as it no longer compiled against the latest xorg release; so whatever that (unknown) nVidia forum post was talking about has long been included in drivers.

    Does the BIOS have any audio options? .. perhaps a switch for AC97/HD-Audio? - If yes what happens if you change them? Have you also experimented with all the available audio devices listed in Kodi?

    What is strange, the system looks ok. I mean, I see all the output, can select HDMI output. There are no errors in dmesg, and so on. Only, there is no sound ;) If I again find this nvidia thread, I will post it here. It was an official nvidia developers forum.. I agree, the fix should be there.

    Quote from chewitt

    Does the BIOS have any audio options? .. perhaps a switch for AC97/HD-Audio? - If yes what happens if you change them? Have you also experimented with all the available audio devices listed in Kodi?

    Yes, I experimented with everything I found. There is exactly this option AC97/HD-Audio in bios, tried them both and see no change in Kodi - the audio devices look the same, and no sound when I select HDMI. Is there any preference here? BIOS suggest to use HD-Audio.

    I also tried playing sound from console, using speaker-test, or aplay. Also tried to load pulseaudio sink for HDMI output on the card. Nothing helped. There is not even any error, speaker-test seems like it's playing..


    I understand there isn't much we can try this way, so was looking mainly for some basic steps to get closer in such situation.

    On your ION board, all works fine from the beginning?