My new 5700XT card is only supported in newer linux kernels, so I am using 5.4.0-14-generic.
Using this card plugged into my TV has been causing a lot of audio problems.
The HDMI sound cuts out, frequently, for a few seconds at a time.
Watching a youtube video seems ok, but playing games or watching a full screen video shows the problem.
Originally I though this was the specific game I was playing (Lego harry potter), but investigation showed that it also happened in other games and applications.
I’ve tried various distros with the newer 5.x kernels and found the same problems.
I have found that Pulseaudio is reporting a very low fragment and buffer size for the card:
iain@monolith1:~$ pactl list sinks | grep size
device.buffering.buffer_size = “17664”
device.buffering.fragment_size = “2944”
These numbers seem to be far too low.
Checking ALSA directly gives me:
iain@monolith1:~$ cat /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/sub0/hw_params
access: MMAP_INTERLEAVED
format: S16_LE
subformat: STD
channels: 2
rate: 44100 (44100/1)
period_size: 736
buffer_size: 4416
To “solve” the problem I did added the following to
/etc/pulse/daemon.conf
; default-fragments = 2
; default-fragment-size-msec = 250
These numbers were pulled from a post on ARCH forums,
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=223446
Performing the calculations myself led to even worse results, so I used higher values suggested in various places.
EDIT: This didn’t actually help in Lego Harry Potter. Time to try some more things.