Simultaniously Audo on both speaker and SPDIV

[Arn01805]

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to get audio working at both speaker out and digital out.

The reason: I want to connect the speaker out to my tv and the digital out to my dolby receiver. sometimes i want sound only from tv, other times (movies) i just want to turn on my receiver and have (5.1) sound from my receiver.

If it's not possible to have this simultaniuous, is it possible to easy switch in MP?

[thematrixz]

This is the limitation of Windows/sound card. As far as I know, you can only route audio to 1 output at a time.

I'm not sure if it'll work the way you want, even if you have 2 sound cards.

[Spragleknas]

How about connecting your TV-speakers to the receivers output, i.e. headphones?

[thematrixz]

Originally Posted by Spragleknas

How about connecting your TV-speakers to the receivers output, i.e. headphones?

You can do that, but it has other disadvantages:

1. Usually if you plug into the headphone jack, TV speakers will be disabled therefore you have to plug/unplug when changing audio routing destination.

2. Viewing casual TV, we might want to settle for lower resolution audio through analog port, but if we watched a hidef movie, we usually want digital audio and other surround decoding methods that might only be available thru Spdif or optical outputs.



Right now, I'm using a Y splitter cable to feed both my external amplifer and the TV with analog output from the sound card.

[Arn01805]

Originally Posted by thematrixz

Right now, I'm using a Y splitter cable to feed both my external amplifer and the TV with analog output from the sound card.

This is the way I did it before too.. Later, I even managed to get 2 soundcard outputs (analogue) to have line out and play on the same time..

Now, i recently upgraded to DVB, and I want to be able to route 5.1 sound in digital way to my receiver. If I redirect the line out from my receiver to the TV, I have to turn on the receiver at all times, so what's then the use to route it to the TV set, I could as well use the receivers speakers.

My point here is to use standard direct soundcard to TV.. When watching movies with 5.1 sound, have the sound on my receiver.

Is there any way to change the output from a batch file? this way I can add 2 menu entries in MP to switch audio from analogue(stereo) to digital(Dolby digital 5.1) and visa versa.

[Alvinder]

This will be really handy feature to have to change the settings to output sound in digital and analog.

I have got an amp which has multi zone. After i did setup everything i found that zone 2 is only Analog.

I will try this weekend to have the S Video output from my video card and sound from the head phone.

The problem i know i will face when playing the DVD's where all the processing is done in the amp as signal is fed through spdif.

I am not that technical but if there is a way to change the settings as a batch file rather than going into configuration and changing will be great help.

[synthdood]

Interesting discussion! I am in a similar situation. For MP3, DVD and DTS I want to feed the 5.1 through spdif to the receiver and simultaneously analog to the the TV. As soon as you configure MP to output AC3 and DTS through spdif, the analog out becomes silent, so everything needs to come from the spdif output.

The option to route an analog signal from the receiver back to the TV (assuming the receiver has a down-mixed stereo line-out that works when a 5.1 stream is being decoded!) could be problematic timing wise. Most LCD and plasma TVs have a delay of 20-100mSec. When using the Y-split method one can compensate for this with the delay in the receiver so that audio from the main speakers and audio from the TV are in sync. When feeding the TV from the receiver however, this may not give the desired result if the line-out is also being delayed. The TV will just add its delay to that of the receiver and the result is that it will not be possible to get the TV and the main speakers in sync.

I am just in the process of finishing a new HTPC (I will post in the ongoing/finished HTPC project threads one of these days) and if I can find the time to actually finish the thing I will do some tests to see if looping back from the receiver is a viable option. It probably also depends very much on the type of receiver, so what may work for one receiver may not work for another.

[Arn01805]

Still, this way, you've to turn on the receiver. When i've to do this, I can listen on the 5.1 receiver, no need to have sound through tv speakers. My concern is, I want to leave the receiver off and still have sound through the TV speakers.

Can it be possible to have 2 soundcards playing at the same time, one at analoge, the other at spdif?

Or can someone build support to switch analogue and spdif from the remote control? This thing is realy on my wish-list.

[James]

Why don't you want to use the receiver all the time?

I use mine for everything over SPDIF.

[hansdegit]

I tried for months to get this working. Ordinary, cheap DVD players of around 30 euro's do this trick natively..

To cut a long story short, it's a limitation of your chipset.

SPDIF/passtrhough is literally a passtrough, which means that the DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) is by-passed. That means that you either have sound in 5.1 through your receiver or stereo through line-out.

It sucks bigtime. But it's not something the MP community can help you with.

BTW: some chipsets DO support parallel SPDIF and line-out.