[PeterS]

Alright, the new Intel High Definition Audio comes with support for Dolby Digital Live! This new feature is supposed to be able to encode Dolby Digital audio in real-time from multi-channel audio sources and send them down the line as SPDIF DD audio.


Question is, do the DVD-A decoders for the PC use DirectSound to output their 6 channels of Analog audio? If they do, then the Dolby Digital Live should be able to re-encode these as Dolby Digital Tracks and send them to the processor.


Reason I ask is that my processor lacks 6-channel analog in, and I am not interested in buying the add-on which supports it ($2k) as I don't plan on listening to more than a couple DVD-A discs - ever.


Any idea if this will work?


Can anyone point me to a good DVD-A player for the PC?


Thanks

 

[Sherbona]

AFAIK currently the only way to play DVD-A at full resolution from a PC is to use the analog connectors of an Audigy2 and use either the Creative software player or the WinDVD5/6 with appropriate audio pack.


Not sure if direct sound is used, but there's a couple of reasons why you wouldn't want to encode the DVD-A to DD in real-time:


- the accompanying sound-quality loss defeats the whole purpose of DVD-A (DD encoding is a lossy compression process, just like converting wav to mp3).


- most DVD-A discs already have DD or even DTS tracks on them which you might as well use.