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[Trumpetguy]

My living room laptop has two primary uses: 1) standalone, using the built-in speakers and 2) running theater view connected to the TV with hdmi, bitstreaming audio through hdmi.

I always forget to switch audio playback device between laptop speakers and bitstreaming through hdmi, which invariably causes some annoyed response from kids and wife...
Is there any way to use automatic zone switch or otherwise switch audio path when the hdmi cable is connected and disconnected?

[Trumpetguy]

*bump*

[glynor]

I don't think so.

[AndrewFG]

^

I am not completely sure of this, but I am guessing the following..

In Windows, when you connect or disconnect a USB device, the Windows plug & play (PnP) sub- system detects the change, and broadcasts a system message "hardware changed" to all applications. And I guess that when you connect or disconnect an HDMI device, it works the same way. So MC could monitor these PnP broadcasts to detect when audio / video devices are connected or disconnected, and change its active output port accordingly. This is exactly analogous to the way that MC already monitors the UPnP broadcasts to detect when UPnP / DLNA renderers are connected or disconnected..

[Hendrik]

This already works if you use DirectSound with the Default Audio Device, it follows the active preferred audio device of Windows, which gets updated when you connect a new one.
However, DirectSound is the only one that supports it right now.

We may introduce the default device option for WASAPI as well in the future, but unlikely for any other outputs, since the output itself needs to send these change events.

[mwillems]

This already works if you use DirectSound with the Default Audio Device, it follows the active preferred audio device of Windows, which gets updated when you connect a new one.
However, DirectSound is the only one that supports it right now.

We may introduce the default device option for WASAPI as well in the future, but unlikely for any other outputs, since the output itself needs to send these change events.

Actually, depending on the device, I've seen rare automatic switching with WASAPI as well.  I have a little USB dac that I use with my laptop, and JRiver is set to output to it using WASPAI. If I unplug the DAC, JRiver seems to automagically change the output device to the laptop's speakers; when I plug the DAC back in (as long as nothing is currently playing) it seems to change the device back to WASAPI pointing at the DAC.  

That device, however, is definitely the exception. I have a few other USB DACs, and none of them exhibit that same behavior.  It may be related to the fact that the one that does the auto-switch is USB Audio Class 2 compliant (and driverless), and the others require drivers?  Not sure if that moves the ball forward on the HDMI question, but I thought I'd mention that JRiver seems to be picking up on some of those PnP events.