found an old pci sound card with optical s/pdif out, want to use it to playback ac3

[simisimisimi]

hey guys,

my brother gave me an old computer and it's got a sound card in it with an s/pdif out, but no harddrive, nothing - it was the only thing i could still use.

i don't know what sound card it is, it seems like a cheapo one with a yamaha xg ymf 744b chip.

i recently bought a yamaha surround home theatre set and the receiver 's got an optical s/pdif in. i also have a toslink cable and avi movies with ac3 sound.

i am running sagetv 2.2.8.

now my question is: is there a way to take advantage of all this to finally watch dvds and avis with ac3 surround sound in sagetv? how do i do this?

i got nvidia codecs installed.

thank you very much

simon

[simisimisimi]

can anyone help, PLEASE?

i'm very anxious to do this, and it doesn't say anything about it in the manual.

thanks, simon

[gplasky]

Put the card in and get the drivers for it. Get it operating on your PC first. After that config your nVidia audio decoder to use the SPDIF and connect the SPDIF to your Yamaha receiver.

Gerry

[simisimisimi]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Put the card in and get the drivers for it. Get it operating on your PC first. After that config your nVidia audio decoder to use the SPDIF and connect the SPDIF to your Yamaha receiver.

Gerry

thanks a lot.
another question: people are talking about ac3 passthrough a lot. what exactly is this? do i need to configure this?
what happens if a movie has mp3 sound? will it not play it when connected to the receiver through s/pdif?

i would appreciate it a lot if anyone could help!

simon

[gplasky]

If you connect the SPDIF on your soundcard to the SPDIF on your receiver you will be doing passthrough. The AC3 is passed thru from the DVD to your receiver thru the SPDIF and your receiver decodes to DD5.1.
If it has mp3 sound it passes thru and is converted to PCM.

Gerry

[simisimisimi]

Originally Posted by gplasky

If you connect the SPDIF on your soundcard to the SPDIF on your receiver you will be doing passthrough. The AC3 is passed thru from the DVD to your receiver thru the SPDIF and your receiver decodes to DD5.1.
If it has mp3 sound it passes thru and is converted to PCM.

Gerry

thanks a lot.
still another question: you said i need to configure the nvidia codec to use my s/pdif out. i have ac3filter 0.70 installed though. does that change anything?

thanks

simon

[gplasky]

No-whatever audio decoder you use you need to configure to use SPDIF. If one doesn't work try the other.

Gerry

[simisimisimi]

thanks a lot!

but one more thing: i used the nvidia audio codec, but it didn't playback avis that have ac3 sound at first. then i installed ac3filter and it worked. but in the sagetv configuration, i have nvidia selected as audio codec, not ac3 filter. why didn't it playback the avi's with ac3 sound without ac3filter?

thanks

simon

[gplasky]

Start playing a video in Windows Media Player. Look down in your system tray and you should see a icon for nVidia decoder. Right click on that and bring up the properties. In audio you need to setup for SPDIF.

Gerry