Video plays with sound on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, x86 and arm64
Videos on the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, x86 PCs and generic arm64 boards played with no sound. They have sound now, including over HDMI on x86 PCs with common Intel, AMD and Nvidia audio hardware.
If videos played with no sound on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, an x86 PC or another 64-bit ARM board, they have sound from Anthias 2026.06.3, including over HDMI on x86 PCs with common Intel, AMD and Nvidia audio hardware.
The video player on these boards only plays sound through a PulseAudio sound server, and the viewer container didn't run one. Now the viewer container starts its own PulseAudio server at boot, with one output for each sound card the container can see, named after the card, such as alsa_output.vc4hdmi0.hdmi-stereo. On a Raspberry Pi 4, the "Audio output" setting still chooses between "HDMI" and "3.5mm jack". On x86 and generic arm64 boards it has no effect until Anthias 2026.07.4. After a reboot, sound could still go missing until Anthias 2026.07.1.
If a video is still silent, run pactl list short sinks inside the viewer container to see which outputs PulseAudio found.
x86 with HDMI audio
On x86 with "Audio output" set to "HDMI", the viewer asked for a sound device called sysdefault:CARD=HID, which matches no card on common Intel, AMD and Nvidia audio hardware. It now uses default, which is the PulseAudio default output. Generic arm64 boards already worked this way.