Dolby Digital Live through HDMI instead of SPDIF??? Possible?

[eno]

Setup
Pioneer 1222 receiver receiving LPCM audio via HDMI out of my AMD 6970 HDMI. Dobly Digital, DTS , Dolby True HD & DTS Master all work correctly when watching DVD or BluRay movies. The receiver properly jumps over and reads Dolby TrueHD when BluRay is playing and then back when it is a simple 2 channel source.

Soundcard = Creative Xfi with no connections running from it to receiver since my new Pioneer 1222 does not support multi channel inputs. I want to game in true 5.1 sound though so my analog cables are no longer an option.

How to I get Dolby Digital Live / DTS connect style signal over to my new receiver. I would like to send this through my current HDMI hook up if possible. Or do I need a optical cable for which I will have to manually change my output type and receiver input each time I game. This is like what I used to have to do to run analog from soundcard verse digital connection for movies.

So to be clear, my movie audio/video playback is perfect to my receiver via HDMI out of my AMD 6970 video card. My games are perfect in the video department but my sound is simply 2 channel PCM. How do I stream Dolby Digital Live multi channel out of my system and hopefully through my HDMI cable as the pass through?

 

[poofyhairguy]

Dolby Digital Live's whole purpose is to take whatever the sound stream is and re-encode it as Dolby Digital so it's compatible with SPDIF.

In the HDMI era the HDMI cable should be able to transcode the audio however it is- DTS, Dolby digital, DTS HD, etc. Basically there is no need for Dolby Digital Live, so I don't think it is possible to do it.

HDMI can certainly carry 5.1 audio for gaming, that is how my setup is. The most likely problem is there is some problem with your setup software-wise that doesn't allow games to bitstream the 5.1 track via HDMI. Whenever Windows decodes audio, it sends out as many channels as the number of speakers you have set in your Windows audio output configuration. This occurs even if the material you are playing does not have that many channels. If you are not bitstreaming DD or DTS and instead decoding the audio on the PC, you need to change the number of speakers in Windows to the number of channels in your audio file.

 

[JeffMD]

DDS and DTS connect are not part of the original bundle for the xfi cards, you will need to purchase it from http://software.store.creative.com/p/software/dolby-digital-live-and-dts-connect-pack

Keep in mind these are for gaming. if you are just playing back movies, you should be able to set the video player to bitstream over the optical link, this will simply relay the encoded stream from the disc to the receiver. Because the player does not need to decode anything, it does not need any of the licensed codecs.

 

[Deders]

I used to use an X-FI and since getting my receiver I used it less and less.

Games should output surround sound over HDMI so long as windows is set up correctly.

Someone I know has had problems with his 5870 not outputting surround in games, he recently upgraded to a 390 and now it works perfectly.

As for DD/DTS encoding, once you have bought the software module from creative (it did come bundled with some of the higher end X-FI's) you will need an optical cable as it won't route the sound through HDMI.

You have to enable your choice of encoding in the creative control panel and select speakers, not optical out in the list playback devices in windows.

For some reason for me DD sounded heavily compressed, both in dynamic range and artefact wise, DTS sounded much better but after a while I would hear clicking in one of the speakers no matter what bit depth or sampling frequency I chose.

 

[JeffMD]

When ever I view dd streams in movies they are always lower then dts encodes. Glad my xonar card will do dts encoding in realtime.

I did jump from an x-fi optical to hdmi for a while, but a new ultra wide monitor I got made it impossible to use the pass through any more so I had to go back to optical. What sucked is my newest mobo was a mini atx with no full pci slots so I had to get a new video card too. ended up getting that xonar dsx.

 

[Deders]

When ever I view dd streams in movies they are always lower then dts encodes. Glad my xonar card will do dts encoding in realtime.

I did jump from an x-fi optical to hdmi for a while, but a new ultra wide monitor I got made it impossible to use the pass through any more so I had to go back to optical. What sucked is my newest mobo was a mini atx with no full pci slots so I had to get a new video card too. ended up getting that xonar dsx.

Firstly what do you mean by lower? DD or DTS streams that have already been encoded into films or TV are different, what's actually happening there is it is being bitstreamed directly and being decoded by your receiver. Different receivers will handle them differently, some will be better at making up for DD's deficiencies. When I use the X-FI to encode what it calls DD, it sounds vastly inferior to ready encoded DD streams from TV or movies.

You may have noticed I also went ultrawide, but I have to use separate signals for Video and audio as I have found it doesn't send the audio signal back down to the receiver if I put them in a HDMI chain.

I use Dual link DVI to connect to my monitor and HDMI to connect to my receiver. I have to set the receiver resolution to 800x600 and place that area of the desktop so its top left corner is touching the bottom right corner of my actual desktop, but it means I still have full resolution audio and only have to resort to Optical if I want to send a stereo signal to the receiver.

I'm interested to know how Xonar's handle audio, do they have volume management for night time watching/gaming? Do they have their own DTS encoder?