nVidia drivers - no more DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD?

[Geofram]

Hey all,

I have a HTPC with an nVidia video card - GTX 960. Been running it for at least 6 months without really any trouble, but a couple of days ago, after updating the video drivers, I realized that DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD wasn't being passed into my receiver any longer.

After a lot of troubleshooting, I found that they were no longer listed in the "Supported Formats" when I looked at the HDMI out in the Windows Playback Devices section. I did a lot more troubleshooting, including reformatting my PC (which has been running Windows 8.1), installing Windows 10, and eventually going back to 8.1, I found the following facts:

1) If I use the nVidia drivers from early August (355.60) I have DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD show up and work.

2) If I upgrade to ANY driver revision newer, they disappear.

3) This has to do with the Display driver, and not the audio one. Changing the Audio driver doesn't make any difference.

Right now I'm using the nVidia card because it has HDMI 2.0; everything else in my Home Theater is 4K capable, so I wanted a video card that would be as well, which doesn't give me many options.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is there a way to force the nVidia driver to re-enable DTS-HD and TrueHD?

 

[jkauff]

Sounds like nVidia has decided they're not making enough profit on the 960 to afford the licensing fees for DTS-HD and TrueHD. Hold on to your older drivers.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Could just be a bug. At one point, a driver update completely borked CUDA rendering on my 960. A driver swap fixed it, and an update later on also worked.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Most likely a bug. Its seen before. If you got a DP to HDMI adapter you may find its back and working for the sound.

 

[13Gigatons]

So it will be advertised as Dolby "Ready" and you will need to pay an extra fee.

 

[Geofram]

Could just be a bug. At one point, a driver update completely borked CUDA rendering on my 960. A driver swap fixed it, and an update later on also worked.

This is what I'm hoping, but they have 3 newer driver releases, and it happens in all of them, which worries me. Also, the drivers I'm using apparently have a DXVA bug in them. If I enable DXVA in Kodi, the video playback is...messed up. All washed out, almost like every other frame is all white. It's weird. So I have it disabled.

The real kicker is when I tried Windows 10. The "Built in" driver supported the HD formats, but had some serious flickering all over the place when using the desktop or anything. If you update the windows 10 driver to any of their official Windows 10 drivers at all, the HD formats disappear. The revision I have for Windows 8 doesn't come up as a Windows 10 driver.

 

[Geofram]

Most likely a bug. Its seen before. If you got a DP to HDMI adapter you may find its back and working for the sound.

I wish I had one; the 4K thing makes this impossible right now though. They don't sell a converter that does DP 1.3 to HDMI 2.0. One is announced, but that's it.

I might have to drop 4K until things mature more here, depending on what's going on with the nVidia drivers.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Just stay with 355.60 for now and wait and see with new drivers as they come.