Can someone explain htpc audio setup?

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post #1 of 5

9/28/12 at 4:10am

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51 Posts. Joined 10/2005
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Hello...I have a htpc running out of the computer mother board hdmi port to my projector and have a audio card toslink into my yamaha receiver for the audio.

Now I watch x264 movies that say that they are encoded with dolby and dts but for some reason my receiver never decodes it like my old dvd player did when I played a movie through that and into my receiver...it's like when I hit play on the dvd player there is a switching noise on my receiver and then I get the dts or dolby output. But nothing when I play the movie on my computer.

Is there a setting I have to have set on the audio card or maybe something with VLC player or something else?

Thanks.

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post #2 of 5

9/28/12 at 11:47am

914 Posts. Joined 1/2003
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It sounds like your HTPC is doing the decoding before the audio gets to your receiver. You need to set you movie playing software (more specifically the audio decoder) to "passthrough" the audio track. Passthrough allows the DTS and/or DD audio track to arrive at the receiver "undecoded" thus allowing the receiver to do the decoding. VLC I believe has a setting that allows audio passthrough but I am not sure since I don't use it (not the best player for this). I prefere MPC-HC with LAV decoders and madVR renderer. The LAV audio decoder has a passthrough option even for High-def audio tracks like DTS-HD and TrueHD but you need a receiver with HDMI that can handle those tracks.

post #3 of 5

10/1/12 at 8:48am

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Saw the passthrough but still does not trigger the dolby or dts on my receiver...hmmmm

post #4 of 5

10/1/12 at 10:32am

2,496 Posts. Joined 12/2002
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I suspect your audio is passing out the HDMI port and NOT the toslink to your AVR. Disable the HDMI Audio driver in Device Manager and select your toslink as the default audio. Set it up as 2-channel audio so it will allow the digital stream to passthrough to your AVR; otherwise, the PC will try to decode and you'll only get PCM over to your AVR, not the DTS/DD you're seeking. I too avoid VLC player and use MPC-HC as my preferred stand alone player. For routine playback I use MediaPortal along with either the Win 7 MS decoders, or the MPC-HC stand alone filter for audio and SPDIFER for my audio.

post #5 of 5

10/1/12 at 10:54am

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