clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Aug 4, 2023

I have recently acquired a Corebooted Lenovo ThinkPad T440p from minifree, and it is awesome except for two things:

- Fn in the lower left and Ctrl next to it, instead of Ctrl in the lower left. Oh well.
- No audio over HDMI. This is more than annoying and impedes our ability to enjoy movie night.

I thought it was maybe because I had an Apple miniDP->HDMI cable, so I bought a generic one, but it still doesn't work.

Audio settings recognize that there is an audio device on the HDMI port, but when I try to use it, mpv and vlc both just speed through the video with no audio output and mpv says "Audio underrun detected".

I'm finding surprisingly little about this on the web so far. I would have expected a distinguished old model like this to Just Work and failing that having a very well documented workaround to make it work.

I'm using Debian and KDE. Any ideas?

Show threadJason_DoddAug 4, 2023
@clacke i had the audio issue too but forgot how it solved it.
Show threadclacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Aug 4, 2023
@Jason_Dodd With coreboot or BIOS?
Show threadJason_DoddAug 4, 2023
@clacke bios. coreboot has only been aspiratoinal for me up until now.
Show threadclacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Aug 4, 2023
@Jason_Dodd That gives me hope that it's an easier thing to fix, just a setting or driver somewhere.
Show threadJason_DoddAug 4, 2023
@clacke wish i kept notes i could find on my issue and how i solved it but i don't.
Show threadclacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Aug 5, 2023
@Jason_Dodd Do you perhaps have some argument that looks something like snd-intel-hdmi=blah in grub.cfg or /erc/modules.d/* that you have forgotten about, but which is helping you to this day?
Show threadclacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Aug 5, 2023

Here's what *didn't* make any difference so far:
- cold reboot while making sure cable is attached
- put `options snd-hda-intel model=generic` in /etc/modprobe.d/*.conf

My problem is not:
- missing audio device

`aplay -l` has a `card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI]` in there

- muted audio

it's not just silent, e.g. mpv also fails to sync A/V, speeds through the video and reports underrun

- kernel driver failure to register audio

`journalctl --system` has a line `ops i915_audio_component_bind_ops`
it does *not* have a line about "couldn't bind", "No i915 binding" or "Cannot probe"

- nvidia

the Integrated Graphics Controller is the only VGA compatible controller here

Show threadclacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
Oh interesting, the browser actually manages to get sound to the TV, but video still gallops on without sync.
Aug 5, 2023 at 5:04pmWeb
Show threadclacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Aug 5, 2023

I will get a miniDP->USB-C cable, to see if it behaves the same with my screen.

Oh wait, actually that screen takes mini-HDMI too, so that's another thing to try.

The reason I'm considering this is that I saw some conversation before on the web that indicated that the state and settings of the screen could affect how the HDMI link acted on the computer.