Comment # 13 on bug 916048 from Takashi Iwai

(In reply to Troels Just from comment #12)
> You mention it being a nice improvement, may I ask you what that would be? I
> must admit I do not follow PA development that closely.

I also don't follow, but still can tell you that many Bluetooth related fixes
and improvement and HDMI/DP mapping fixes/enhancements have been included.

> Also, if I could ask you a semi-related question since you have your finger
> on the pulse of PulseAudio (Nice pun, 'ey?).
> 
> I run IT for a fairly large (By Danish standards) school, and soon I will be
> deploying openSUSE 13.2 on work laptops for some teachers (The laptops are
> ThinkPad L420 machines).
> 
> What they will often be doing is connecting their laptops to projectors via
> DisplayPort-to-HDMI cables. In this scenario, audio also needs to be passed
> via DisplayPort/HDMI as there are speakers connected to the projectors. Does
> PulseAudio (Maybe 6.0) have some new feature, that would enable
> automatically switching to HDMI audio as soon as it notices an active HDMI
> connection? Or is there some other mechanism that could be used to make is
> as close to seamless as possible? From what I have been able to gather from
> Google searches, there currently is not something like this. There is an
> option to configure simultanious output to both analog and HDMI, but not a
> switching behaviour (At least that was what the forum posts indicated, if
> something has been introduced since then, I am all ears).

The feature should be already there, IIRC.  However, whether it actually works
depends on the hardware; some Intel onboard graphics have a fragile HDMI/DP
audio notification (it's rather a hardware bug), and might not work always
reliably.
In the kernel side, the audio device for HDMI/DP is always present no matter
whether it's plugged or not.  If pavucontrol shows the HDMI device (plugged) or
(unplugged) properly, the switching should work as is.