Is it possible to automatically switch to HDMI sound output? 13.04

Question

I've seen a few similar questions however couldn't find a solution and they were all a few years old.

When I plug my laptop into the TV HDMI port I have to manually go through the sound options and select HDMI to get the sound to play through the TV. Is there a way to make it switch automatically on connection?

thanks

Solution 1

It is not as easy as it looks at first sight to acchieve this. See the discussion below for reasons why it is in fact rather complicated:

• Disucssion on implementing pulseaudio auto-switching of audio devices

The existing modules module-switch-on-connect, and module-switch-on-port-available will not work consistently with HDMI.

At present there is much effort being done to implement a priority list feature which will let us define the priority of an audio device for pulseaudio to route to it (or not):

• Pulseaudio priority routing

Until this will be generally available in a future release of PulseAudio we have not much more choice than manually switching the audio output sink whenever we connect to a HDMI audio device.

To make life easier in case we often have to switch our output devices we may consider writing a small script to enable toggling between two output sinks. See these questions for a start:

• How to change pulseaudio sink with "pacmd set-default-sink" during playback?
• How can I change the default audio device from command line?

Solution 2

I wrote an indicator applet that lets you switch the sound output.

As long as the problem is not solved, this applet is probably a bit more comfortable.

I'm using 12.04. Please let me know if you tried it successfully.

https://github.com/lkettenb/sound-output-switcher

Screentshot:

Solution 3

For Gnome Shell users, the Sound Output Device Chooser is a practical consolation, as long as there is no solution for auto-switching. This has been working well for me with Gnome Shell 3.14 and 3.16 so far.

Comments

[Sanam Patel]

Possible duplicate of Set HDMI sound output automatically on connect/disconnect

[Kyle Chadha]

Works in Ubuntu 13.10 -- awesome! Thanks so much.

[adel]

Not seem to be working properly on Ubuntu 14.04. BTW some people will need to install this first: sudo apt-get install python-appindicator

[Adam F]

Doesn't work in Linux Mint 16

[jperelli]

Works in Ubuntu MATE 16.04.1

[Frank Nocke]

ImportError: No module named appindicator on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

[Yannick Schneider]

wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/…