I've seen a few similar questions however couldn't find a solution and they were all a few years old.
When I plug my laptop into the TV HDMI port I have to manually go through the sound options and select HDMI to get the sound to play through the TV. Is there a way to make it switch automatically on connection?
thanks
It is not as easy as it looks at first sight to acchieve this. See the discussion below for reasons why it is in fact rather complicated:
The existing modules module-switch-on-connect, and module-switch-on-port-available will not work consistently with HDMI.
At present there is much effort being done to implement a priority list feature which will let us define the priority of an audio device for pulseaudio to route to it (or not):
Until this will be generally available in a future release of PulseAudio we have not much more choice than manually switching the audio output sink whenever we connect to a HDMI audio device.
To make life easier in case we often have to switch our output devices we may consider writing a small script to enable toggling between two output sinks. See these questions for a start:
