Simultaniously Audo on both speaker and SPDIV (4 Viewers)

[cnugent]

I too am in the same situation. Most of the time I just listen to the sound through my TV and for some shows, videos and movies that's fine however when I want to hear the same show/movie in Dolby 5.1 I have to grab the wireless keyboard and run MP config to change the output to SPDIF.

So lets throw a question out to all MP developers and plugin developers. Can MP be configured to output sound to analog OR SPDIF while it's running?

I think a quick and easy solution would be some sort of plugin, or the functionality put in MP itself, that would either:

- Ask you where you wanted the audio to go when you loaded up a movie or music or
- Allowed you to easily change where the audio was to go from the home page or
- Allowed the audio destination to be changed by pressing some key/remote button

Has anyone got any views on this? From searching the forums I see that a lot of people are in the same boat and would love to have the ability to direct the audio where they wanted within MP.

 

[Arn01805]

Yeah! This sounds like a very good solution to me.

How to get this feature noticed by the devs?

 

[cnugent]

I've never done it before but maybe create an entry in the 'Improvement Suggestions' forum (https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/improvement_suggestions-f46.html) and link to this discussion also.
What do you think?

 

[yatesd]

If you use a Remote to control MP how about looking into the IR Suite provided in the PlugIn section? I know that this provides lots of nice little hooks that can be used to control items outside of MP in standard Windows - maybe start a batch file that way?

Currently I use my onboard sound for the office and a seperate Sound Card for optical out going through to the lounge and the main TV. However, I currently manually change the default sound device from the tray when the missus kicks me out of the Lounge

Sure this could be automated though?

 

[cnugent]

Hi yatesd.

That is indeed an option that people with 2 sound cards could look into further and I'm sure it would be possible in a script/batch file where you tell Windows to use one card or the other.

For those of us without the 2nd sound card option you have to make the configuration change within the MP configuration utility so it would be great if MP itself (or a plugin) had the ability to make these config changes while MP is running.

yatesd, do you know what the best way to proceed with this issue? Should we post an entry in the 'Improvement Suggestions' forum or do you know an MP/plugin developer?

 

[yatesd]

Agreed I can see that it would be nice to have an option to switch easily within MP and I guess you would need to try and start a thread in the improvements/suggestions section. Unfortunately, I am new this to wonderful piece of SW myself so can't claim to have any contacts to get anything done :-(

However, even when working with one Soundcard surely you still have the option though to configure the output to be via digital or audio - it might be slightly more complicated in terms of you are not simply selecting one device or another but rather one configuration or another of the same device. Is there no way to create a batch or a profile for your cards and trigger the switching of that. I would have assumed that MP would then use the currently selected default whatever config it happened to be.

 

[allanp81]

I quite happily use both at the same time on my Dell XPS 210. My TV is connected via the green audio output and my amp is connected via the SP/DIF output and they work fine. The only thing you can't do is play back anything with AC3 on both, it's one or the other. Everything else is fine though.

 

[cnugent]

Yes that's what's happening to me too but if you take an episode of Prison break for example where it has a dolby digital soundtrack and you want to just listen to it through the TV then you get nothing through the TV because the audio has been sent through SPDIF. The opposite holds through too where if you have a simple MP3 and want to listen to it through your AMP you can't because it's not being sent through the SPDIF connector.

I would love to be able to switch from one output to the other at will so if you know how, or find out how, please tell us.

Cheers.

 

[allanp81]

It all depends what codecs you are using. I use ac3filter to listen to AC3 soundtracks, but I think if you choose to output via both all you'll get on your amp is plain stereo. I can happily play any type of soundtracks out of both the line out and the sp/dif out though.

 

[cnugent]

I wonder if you tell MP to output to SPDIF and tell your card the same, will AC3Filter then downmix the SPDIF output to stereo and pipe it out of the analog output? Anyone try this or know if it works?