Finding the TV 📺
First off, I had to figure out which device my TV connected through my HDMI cable was identified as on my Debian Linux machine.
To figure out this, I used the aplay command which comes with the
alsa-utils package:
$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: CX20751/2 Analog [CX20751/2 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
As you can see, there are two cards. card 0 is the external HDMI
connection to my TV. On that card, there are two devices, device 3
and device 7. card 1 is the internal device (HDA Intel PCH), which
oddly enough isn't the first card listed.
Telling mplayer to play the video on the TV 🎥
HDMI carries both video and sound, so after finding the correct ALSA
card and device, I asked mplayer to channel both video and audio
onto the TV by using the -ao switch like this:
$ mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.7 video.mp4
I didn't know whether or not device 3 or 7 would be the right ones, so I just tried both 😃 Once that was out of the way, the video played flawlessly on my 52" TV with no noticeable lag in neither audio nor video.
