Dolby 5.1 Support?

[ikarus79m]

I use SageTV with DirecTV and I'm wondering if there is any Dolby Digital 5.1 Support.

First of all, does DirecTC broadcast Dolby Digital 5.1 with its movies and series?

I use the Hauppauge PVR-350 to record and play my stuff on TV. Is there any way to record Dolby Digital 5.1 with this?

How would I get the signal back to my Dolby Digital Receiver?

Does anybody using Sage have Dolby Digital 5.1 working or is this simply not possible with the hardware/software available.

If not, what is the future outlook?

[kny3twalker]

no currently there is no support for recording anything other than mono and stereo

maybe with HDTV cards
the best you can do is with like an nforce 2 motherboard which encodes everything into dolby

[dkardatzke]

This is a limitation with the hardware when the encoding is performed.

[stanger89]

Recording DD 5.1 on a PC is a very complicated process, that's because AC3 is lower bitrate than PCM so bascially when transmitted it's padded with 0's to fill the 16-bit 48kHz bandwidth. To capture it you need to record a wav, and then go through and strip the 0's. (do a search to see what's involved, try searching for laserdisc)

Further it's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong), that the amount of true 5.1 content is very limited (movies on premium channels).

One thing you can do is use the AC3Filter beta to expand stereo to 5.1 and then encode to AC3 on the fly. There have been a couple threads on this here already. It's not true DD in the sense that only stereo is recorded, but it may work better than using DPL on your reciever.