Debian+9600GT+SPDIF

Short overview of what I did to get my sound card working properly in at least VLC and Opera (flash video), which is good enough for now. Could not get the default movie player and rhythmbox working sad

This website was key: click here

There are three things I did that are probably related, but I'm not sure what actually triggered it to work.

  1. In alsamixer ("alsamixer" in terminal), set the view to "all" (press f5) and unmute (press "m") S/PDIF
  2. In Volume control (System>Settings>Sound) enable all IEC958 or equivalent (fiddle around with the settings, you'll find it).
  3. In the Multimedia System Selector (in terminal: "gstreamer-properties"), set default output plugin to ALSA and put the device to digital ("ALC889" for me). Both analog and digital worked for me. If you hit test and get a super annoying beep, you know it works

For mplayer, check out page for ubuntu

http://my.opera.com/Smeets/blog/2011/08/02/spdif-digital-out-in-debian-and-maybe-other-linux-distros

EOL