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Thank you for that extensive and helpful summary.
After spending some time on testing, I am persuaded that this issue with digital sound is primarily caused by deficiencies in Apple's sound APIs for handling digital sound, combined with some sub-optimal design in EyeTV.
If EyeTV is set to System Sound Output and the system sound output is digital, no sound comes from EyeTV. Setting EyeTV to Digital Sound restores sound output in EyeTV but disables sound output in all other applications as long as EyeTV is running. Further Apple's apps seem to aware that sound output is not available and refuse to try: eg iTunes will not play songs, and the alert sound selection in System Prefs is greyed out. As Felix wrote the only exception is when FrontRow is invoked from within EyeTV using the Menu button on and Apple IR remote. That is the only way any other app can output sound as long as EyeTV is running and set to digital out. It makes no differences whether or not EyeTV sound is muted when the app is backgrounded.
I will file bug reports/enhancement requests with both Elgato and Apple.
Thank you again for taking the time to explain the issue.
Bill
On 12/07/2010, at 6:09 PM, Felix wrote:
Remote Buddy is not and can't be the cause of your issue:
Remote Buddy does not access the audio system nor does it perform any audio operations/tasks or change any audio settings when you switch between EyeTV and Front Row. The option to auto-mute EyeTV (via AppleScript) when switching to Front Row has also been entirely removed from Remote Buddy for months now to remove any and all remaining confusion that this option seems to have created (=> therefore, please make sure that you're running the latest versions of EyeTV, Remote Buddy and OS X).
With no audio code and no audio operations being executed, and Remote Buddy doing nothing else but simply launching applications (like the Finder does), how could Remote Buddy have any influence or part in your audio issue?
From user reports, it appears to be the case that when you invoke "Front Row" through EyeTV (by pressing the "Menu" button - or - selecting the (in recent releases no longer existing) Front Row entry in EyeTV's menu), EyeTV stops playback and stops using digital audio, thereby making this system resource available to Front Row. And only after this, it invokes Front Row.
Whereas, when you don't invoke Front Row via EyeTV, f.ex. by launching the "Front Row.app" in /Applications in the Finder or Dock (or invoking Front Row via Remote Buddy, which does practically the same), it appears that EyeTV doesn't take any of the aforementioned actions - and you get the result you observe.
Therefore, you should be able to reproduce your issue easily. Just quit Remote Buddy (which is not actually necessary, but do it nonetheless simply to see that your issue occurs regardless of whether Remote Buddy is running), launch EyeTV, start playback of some TV channel or recording in EyeTV, then launch /Applications/Front Row.app using Finder or the Dock (important!).
As a temporary workaround, you may be able to invoke Front Row through EyeTV by using the "Menu button" action from Remote Buddy's "Virtual Remote" - f.ex. by selecting it for a button of your choice at Prefs > Mapping > EyeTV. This will send an emulated Apple Remote "Menu" button press event to EyeTV - and, if you're outside of any EyeTV onscreen menus, EyeTV will subsequently prepare for the invocation of Front Row - and subsequently invoke it for you.
