2024-01-21, 05:09 PM
Thought I would add to this in case it might help other newbies 
Hardware involved: Sound Blaster AE-5 Plus, Radeon 7900XTX
I had no luck getting the flatpak version of Jellyfin Media Player to output 5.1 over spdif on any Distro. On some Distros the snap version would work, but not on my preferred Linux Mint. Directly installing the .deb fixed the audio problem but introduced a hardware decoding bug. When moving around the timeline the screen would become garbled(green blocks) and jumpy, but it would clear up after a few seconds. Because I'm using a 7900XTX I have to upgrade the Kernel on Ubuntu/Debian based Distro's to version 6+, I use 6.5 on Mint. The problem is upgrading the Kernel doesn't upgrade the Kernel firmware, which I ignorantly thought was the case. So I downloaded the latest Kernel Firmware and copied the AMDGPU folder, then rebuilt initramfs, and now hardware acceleration works properly.
Hardware involved: Sound Blaster AE-5 Plus, Radeon 7900XTX
I had no luck getting the flatpak version of Jellyfin Media Player to output 5.1 over spdif on any Distro. On some Distros the snap version would work, but not on my preferred Linux Mint. Directly installing the .deb fixed the audio problem but introduced a hardware decoding bug. When moving around the timeline the screen would become garbled(green blocks) and jumpy, but it would clear up after a few seconds. Because I'm using a 7900XTX I have to upgrade the Kernel on Ubuntu/Debian based Distro's to version 6+, I use 6.5 on Mint. The problem is upgrading the Kernel doesn't upgrade the Kernel firmware, which I ignorantly thought was the case. So I downloaded the latest Kernel Firmware and copied the AMDGPU folder, then rebuilt initramfs, and now hardware acceleration works properly.