Why must I restart for HDMI audio?
- by David Shochat
I have a System76 Lemur Ultra laptop, which has an HDMI port. When I plug in the HDMI cable, it is recognized immediately for video, but not for audio, i.e., it does not show up in the Output tab of the Sound Settings dialog. However, if I do a full restart with the cable plugged in, then it does show up and can be selected. I've also discovered that manually killing and restarting pulseaudio with the HDMI plugged in will force it to be recognized as an available audio output. So my question is, what is broken here? I've thought about writing a bug in launchpad, but I don't know which component is malfunctioning. Is it the kernel? ALSA? Pulse Audio? Something else? By the way, the same bug seems to exist in reverse, namely if I disconnect the HDMI, it is still listed in the Output tab until I again restart the OS. This is 12.04 LTS.