[MPlayer-users] [SOUND]: different alsa-device dending on AC3 possible?

[jpahka at welho.com]

Hello,

I'm using recently recent mplayer and I'm very happy with it. But I have one
question that would make using mplayer much simpler for me.

I'm using alsa as my audio driver and the sound chip of my motherboard (ALC658)
is connected to my external receiver via toslink. Both normal pcm as well as ac3
pass-through work for me beautifully, but I need to use different alsa device
for those two, and that makes it harder for me to use mplayer with other
programs (namely: freevo)

That is: for eg. mp3 I need to use:

   mplayer -ao alsa:device=spdif ...

but for ac3 pass-through I can't use the "device=spdif", I have to use the
default alsa-device, ie. 

   mplayer -ao alsa -ac hwac3 ...

so that mplayer won't decode the ac3 stream in software but passes it on for the
receiver to decode.

Is this the intended behaviour of mplayer? Can it be configured somehow to
automatically drop the "device=spdif" when it find's out that the content has an
ac3 audio-stream?

TIA,

juhis