Only stereo over SPDIF?! HELP PLZ! (1 Viewer)

[ggman]

Hello

First i want to excuse me for my bad english - hope you will be abe to understand me

I have setted up a HTPC
Corei3 530
Asus P7H55-V with ALC887 sound chip SPDIF and HDMI out

I am running windows XP and VISTA but in both i am not able to set up 5.1 sound or 7.1 i have connected the htpc over spdif to my reciever. The reciever displays "PCM" when connected but the sound only comes from the left and right speaker... My speakers are 7.1 - atleast 5.1 would be also nice. The audio drivers are the newest

Best regards,
Max

 

[ThaClown]

Which audio codec are you using?
Id advide to use SAF 5.0 and set 5.1 or 7.1 sound at the end of setup....

AC3 fiter or FFDShow are cood to use too...

 

[vinch100]

I learned a few days ago that the most part of integrated soundcard cannot "bitstream" the surround channel through the spdif interface (only through hdmi if available)... that means that a 5.1 flow is decoded to LPCM before being forwarded over spdif, and by default spdif only accept stereo flows.

The workaround is to use a filter like ffdshow or ac3filter to reencode the flow from LPCM to AC3before it is sent to the output.. or follow ThaClown's advice

 

[jameson_uk]

The problem is that S/PDIF only has enough bandwidth to carryeither stereo decoded audio or a DD/DTS bitstream.

If you want to have multi-channel decoded audio or the HD formats (TrueHD/DTS-HD MA) then you need a HDMI connection and a setup that will allow you to send LPCM over HDMI. (some HDMI connections only add an S/PDIF signal to the HDMI stream so it all depends on hardware)

As above, only way around this is you have sources which are multi-channel decoded audio is to encode them on the fly to AC3 (DD) or DTS with AC3Filter or FFDshow but this will loose quality as you do it