2 sound cards, 2 screens

[Leszek Koltunski <leszek 3miasto net pl>]

Hello!

I've got a NVidia GPU with a TV-Out, so I bought a second sound card and 
connected the TV-out and the sound card to my TV with a A/V cable.

Then, in NVidia's graphical settings thingy, 'nvidia-settings' I've set 
the TV to be in what NVidia calls a 'separate X screen'. My main monitor 
is thus in :0.0 and the TV is in :0.1.

I also have a wireless keyboard and mouse which still work if I move them
to my living room. So now I can lie down on my sofa and enjoy a separate 
instance of Gnome happily running on the TV. (yes, I was positivly 
surprised when I saw Gnome automatically detecting the second X screen 
and booting there! Good job!) I call it a 'poor man's media center'.

Now, obviously, I use this setup mostly to watch movies on the TV. That 
works almost flawlessly, with exception of the sound. All applications 
running in the second instance of Gnome still use the first sound card, 
so the sound does not come from the TV but rather from my computer's 
speakers.

To get around that, I have written special scripts which start MPlayer 
with audio out set to the second sound card

mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0 ...

but obviously this situation is suboptimal.

Thus the question: is there a way to configure Gnome so that the one 
running in screen :0.0 will use soundcard 'alsa:device=hw=0.0' and the 
one running in screen :0.1 the 'hw=1.0' soundcard?

best,

Leszek

PS. There are a few more issues with this setup , most notably in the 
mixer applet. Please take a look at

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=556178