AC3

[SageGk]

I tried to watch some Xvids yesterday that have the 5.1 sound track in them. Long story short, I could only get stereo sound out of Sage, and I even changed the audio decoder to AC3. Sage would not use AC3 filter however and I could not get it to work. Any fix for this?

[wylee]

If you are using AC3, run the AC3 config program that is in the SageTV directory - or download it from AC3filter.net

If your sound is going through to a receiver, the SPDIF passthrough may not be set properly for DTS and Dolby Digital.

[SageGk]

I will try that! I configured ac3filter on my PC (seperate install from Sage). And then I selected AC3 for my audio decoder. I didn't know there was a separate config specifically for Sage. Thanks!

[SageGk]

Originally Posted by wylee

If you are using AC3, run the AC3 config program that is in the SageTV directory - or download it from AC3filter.net

If your sound is going through to a receiver, the SPDIF passthrough may not be set properly for DTS and Dolby Digital.

Tried it and AC3 filter still will not activate. I selected the option so it would show in the sys tray, but I get nothing.....

[planetc]

I had to set ac3 as default directshow decoder using radflight filter manager in order to get 5.1 xvids to use it in sage. From there I could set spdif passthrough as required. The decoder settings in sage didn't affect the xvids at all.

This did mean that I had to set my multimedia audio decoder in sage manually to use cyberlink (previously default) as I didn't want that going through ac3. I use this to convert my tv to prologic 2 as I am using a Dolby soundcard rather than a receiver and it won't do prologic.

Hence I needed ac3 to get the 5.1 out of the xvids. It's a bit of juggling but it works nicely now as long as I pause at the start of a movie for a second or two while the sound and pictures catch up with each other. Otherwise the sound is a bit spluttery. I would of course be interested if anyone knows a better way?

[wylee]

Can you describe "sputtery"? I had a cheapy sound card that used a C-Media chipset. Although the driver was set for passthrough, the crappy drivers still did some processing which caused my sound to drop off every few minutes.

There's an opensource driver for C-Media cards - if your sound card is based on this chipset, try using those: http://code.google.com/p/cmediadrivers/
- worked wonders for my sound.

[planetc]

Spluttery as in like the decoder doesn't lock into the signal properly and is trying to. This is with the soundcard doing the conversion to output analogue to power amps however, not passthrough to a receiver. As stated, pausing briefly and then returning to play solves the problem and it doesn't appear to reoccur for the duration of the movie.

This is an Audigy 4 Pro which I believe is incompatible with the drivers you reference, although I have read of a similar opensource driver for it, I suppose it may be worth trying that. I use Ac3filter as default directshow decoder and have that set to passthrough to the soundcard, this was the only way I could get the card to pickup the flag and start the digital decoder within the card when watching a 5.1 ac3 xvid.

I have dvd settings set the same way in sage, although I suppose I could set this to default now that ac3 is set as default decoder. Again the only setting I have pointing elsewhere is sage multimedia decoder which is set as cyberlink in order to give me prologic2 on my tv viewing.

This may well be caused by the fact that I am using 'marginal' hardware so I expect to have a few minor issues as a result. All other clients in the house use Ac3 to downmix to stereo without issue.

My entire sage system, currently a two source server and four clients, is built around hardware I had in my garage that owes me nothing. This ranges from an xp2500+ headless server with 1gig ram to a p3 733 256mb with onboard graphics and sound. I have enough bits to add a client to the remaining rooms in the house as time allows.

After a little tweaking ( a lot maybe ) I get good performance throughout the house, the biggest difference at this level of hardware is attained by dropping animations throughout the ui. I have seen some threads that suggest you cannot get decent performance from hardware that way exceeds the specification I am using, which I would challenge. Certainly from an SD point of view it is perfectly possible to get a very useable network going for very little money.

Now I realise I have gone totally off topic so I should stop, maybe this could be another interesting topic in itself.

regards p

[SageGk]

OK, AC3 filter actually launches with LiveTV, but I cant get it to launch when watching xvids...anyone know why?

[wylee]

It could be that the XVids are using the default decoder which may not be AC3Filter.

If you install it from AC3Filter.net, and it's the last decoder you installed, should be able to set the video playing to use the default one and it should engage.

I had that problem when installing FFDShow to handle my XVid/DivX movies which was done after installing AC3Filter. So I uninstalled everything and made sure:

FFDShow was installed first
NVidia PureVideo
AC3Filter