HDMI on RPi UbuntuMATE

I have just set-up HDMI on my machine which I use with my television. I used HDMI because my TV, whilst having vga-in, did not have a mini sound jack-in. So, HDMI was the only solution to get sound and video in together. However, when I first connected it up, I too got no sound.

What you have to do, with the HDMI cable already connected, is go to sound preferences/output:

As you can see, from my screen-shot, HDMI is not listed. However, this is because I am writing from my laptop. On my machine connected to my TV (as with yours) I have the HDMI cable connected and so it will appear as an output option. You just need to select it and then close

That's it. you should now find HDMi is ouputting sound as well as video

As Steve said, look at "Output" and select your HDMI device:

When using Paman, check "Output" and make sure your HDMI connection doesn't say "Unplugged"!:

See also:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/

Steve, thanks for your prompt help. I am quite sure you are right, but
unfortunately that is precisely my problem. The Sound/Output option does
not show HDMI at all, only the Analogue option. The same is true with
PAMAN. I can see from the screen captures online what it OUGHT to show,
but nothing seems able to make it do so. I think I will try again from
scratch. There must be a bug in there somewhere.

Have you checked in Synaptic > Settings >Repositories > Additional Drivers for your hardware drivers?. :smiley:

If you don’t have Synaptic installed: Control Center > Other > Sofware & Updates > Additional Drivers. :smiley:

Thanks. Yes, I had checked for additional drivers, though I can’t really
see that it ought to be necessary. After all, the only drivers needed
are for the RPi2 board, and since this version of Ubuntu MATE is
specifically for that board, the necessary drivers should surely be
included. All it needs to be able to do is send the digital stream to
the HDMI output. How can there be any question of an incompatible, or
missing, audio driver? Incidentally, I have found that, although
offering analogue, it does not even produce any sound to earphones
plugged directly into the RPi2. I have also tried a second installation
completely from scratch, but it is all exactly the same. Everything else
works perfectly, including networking with the Microsoft WORKGROUP - but
no sound. (I have installed the updates offered, of course.) Is no-one
else having this problem? Very strange!

Hi,

try checking your software sources download location is set to main, if it is already; change it to something else, also make sure that you have the “Canonical” repo marked:

After making any changes try running an update again!. :smiley:

Have you installed any codecs for your system like the package “ubuntu-restricted-extras” ?.

On my Pi 2 I needed to edit /boot/config.txt and set hdmi_drive, or something like that, to 2 in oder for audio to work over HDMI.

This might help?:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/HDMI

Thank you. This does look interesting indeed. The trouble is though that my RPi/Ubuntu is not even TRYING to send HDMI audio. It doesn’t recognise the presence of HDMI at all. It looks most likely to me at present that this is a failure of or absence of an appropriate driver. After all, the same RPi2 and TV have been giving excellent sound with the OpenELEC and Raspbian Media Centres.
I think I shall give it a rest for a while. Perhaps an upgrade of Ubuntu MATE for RPi will fix it in due course. I very much appreciate the help you have all been giving me though.

Hello JohnHenry,
if by any chance you solved this issue, would you be kind enough to help me with it ?
I just installed Ubuntu Mate on the Raspberry Pi 2 and encountering the same problem…
Thank you.

The Ubuntu MATE 15.10 image for the Raspberry Pi 2 will be out tomorrow and defaults to audio over HDMI.

Thx ! Does it mean that I’ll be able through a sudo apt-get update + sudo apt-get upgrade to benefit from the upgrade ?
Or do I have to re-install everything…

Reinstall. Upgrading is impractical (take 4 hours or more) on the Pi 2 and won’t work reliably due the the unusual way the Pi kernel is provided.

I just installed Ubuntu Mate 15.10 on my RPi2, and I have the exact same problem. No sound, and the HDMI output isn’t appearing as an option at all. OSMC and openELEC work perfectly fine on the same setup. Any ideas?

There will be a 15.10.1 release soon, this is fixed. To fix it on your current system edit /boot/config.txt and comment out hdmi_drive=2

The problem I been having is in the settings if I hook up a external sound card that has a mic in on it I can’t get it to record audio from my mic in input without it making noise? Could that be that Ubuntu mate 15.10 needs some sort of hardware acceleration to make it better? The program I would use is Audacity.

Hi,

you need to turn the mic down to about 50% input level as I have the same problem on my mini notebook if the mic sound level is above 50%!. :smiley:

I too am having tho same problem with my pi 3. HDMI isn’t an option in output and I can’t get audio no matter what I try. Fresh install of mate 15.10.3. Any help would be great.

From https://ubuntu-pi-flavour-maker.org/faq/

How do I get audio over HDMI?

If you’ve connected your Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 to a screen via HDMI and you can hear any audio, try editting /boot/config.txt, uncomment #hdmi_drive=2 and reboot.

2 Likes

I’m afraid I’m also jumping on the band wagon.

Have a Pi3 running the latest ubuntu mate, video works fine through HDMI but no audio. I don’t have the option to select it in sound preferences (just bcm2385 ALSA analogue stereo). Edited the configure file, checked drivers, pulseaudio etc…but nothing. Very keen to find a solution as it’s driving me mad! :thinking:

All of that said I jus went to shut it down for the night and got some audio…still don’t have hdmi option to select in sound preferences but just did speaker test and got some stuttery/echo ‘front right’ … Confused :confounded: