Hello,
I have a vexxing problem which I have spent multiple days troubleshooting. I have a WIndows Media Center with an ATI Radeo HD5870. I am running Windows 7 64bit. I also use the Media Browswer Plug-in to view most of my video files. I have plenty of files which are encoded with Dolby DTS 5.1 sound. The goal is to be able to pul Dolby streaming (DTS, TruHD, DDL) into my reciever. I use an HDMI connection to my Pioneer VSX-1121-K receiver. I have been trying to get Dolby streaming through HDMI, but have not had any luck getting dolby out of it. In my playback devices properties, it clearly shows the codecs are there.
This past weekend I tried putting a Soundblaster X-FI Titanium and a Recon3D in my MC and set the audio to come out the SPDIF output. I had limited success with this approach, where I got some sound out after many permutations, but never got Dolby out of it. Finally I pulled the cards out as HDMI still gives me 8 channels of audio feed, even if it is isn't groomed for Dolby, it is still provides more sound and more clear sound.
I have looked up this with ATI Radeon, and it is stated that there are audio property drivers for the ATI Catalyst, but I cannot get them loaded. I did find where you have to not only have all sound devices disabled, but you also must not have any sound drivers loaded. I have tried uninstalling ATI Catalyst and reinstalling it, but still the audio properties are not loaded. I have also tried loading the FireGL driver which has specific HDMI audio drivers, but still my Catalyst Control Panel does not allow me any audio properties.
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/fire/Pages/fire_win7-64.aspx
My control is that I have a Transformers Dark Side of the Moon BluRay DVD and I also have it as a file encoded with DTS and 5.1. When I play it with the Bluray player has a much richer sound with a true bass wave, where I play the same file through my media center and it is clearly not the same. Both are playing the audio signal through HDMI into the same reciever, so it is clearly within my ATI HDMI.
Please help? At this point if there is anyway to get the Dolby outputs for Media Center movies I will try it.
Thanks.
First thing to check, go into Media Center, choose Settings in the "Tasks" menu, then...
TV -> Audio -> and un-check "Auto Volume".
After it's un-checked, try it again. If it was already un-checked, or if this didn't help, write back and let me know.
Click to see my hardware config
I checked. TV>Audio>Auto Volume was unchecked.
Interestingly there is a greyed out selection for Dolby output which had three modes, Theater, Nornal and Night. However I cannot actually access these selections.
Neither can I. That's not your problem. Next thing to check is...
Open Control Panel in Windows. Open the "Sound" applet. Click the "Playback" tab. Choose your audio output device (the default is indicated by a green check mark). Click the "Properties" button.
Then, click the "Supported Formats" tab. Is "DTS" and "Dolby" checked here? If not, check those boxes... then click OK, OK, etc.
The default sound device is the ATI Radeon HDMI output. It has many Dolby output choices under the box for encoded formats. There is no box to check. It just has all of them included.
Thanks for bearing with me.
Can you take a screen shot of what you're looking at and post it here? Once you get to the "encoded formats" tab, press ALT+PRINT_SCREEN, then open MSPaint, and paste your picture there. Save it as a .JPG and attach it here.
OK. Here is what I have.
Weird. Mine has a check box next to each of them... and I can check or un-check them at will. Have you tried clicking on those entries in the list, or double-clicking, or right-clicking on them to see if they can be changed?
Or... maybe there are some settings in some software that came with your video card?
Another word of advice... go post your question at http://www.thegreenbutton.tv. That forum is much more active than this one... and there are probably people who have had exactly your problem in the past and maybe they can help you.
The check box is not available for HDMI because HDMI reads the data from EDID. With S/PDIF, you have to manually tell Windows what formats are supported.
Didn't find what you were looking for here? Head over to http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums for even more helpful information.
Thanks, Richard. I don't yet have an AVR with HDMI switching. Do you have any suggestions for the OP?
I believe the problem is software related. Considering the OP is having trouble with both HDMI and S/PDIF, we can safely rule out the connection as the problem. However, S/PDIF is more powerful for troubleshooting audio problems than HDMI is, so I would recommend switching to S/PDIF for troubleshooting purposes. Once you can get DD/DTS bitstreaming working over S/PDIF, you can move on to HDMI.
Start by opening the S/PDIF device properties. As was explained above, go to the Supported Formats tab and make sure there is a check next to both DTS and Dolby Digital. If you click on one, you will see the Test button become active. Click it. Windows should now send a DD/DTS bitstream test tone to your AVR. You should hear the tone coming from all 6 speakers.
Please post back the results.
OK, so to get SPDIF even active I would have to re-enable it in the BIOS and then re-install the realtek audio drivers and try again. An update is that I finally figured out why I was having problems at the most basic level. I will be back to this, even though I solved the problem for a few days.
When I went into the properties of the actual HDMI output, I verified the driver and saw that it wasw realtek audio. This obviously was a remnant of when the onbaord audio was enabled, so when I forced it to an ATI HDMI audio driver and suddenly I had HDMI sound. Then it was a matter of tweaking the settings, which I did to get the most HDMI Dobly output possible. Things were good for a while, until I read too much and decided to try an audio codec splitter and a new codec pack. This was done to see if I could get the Dobly encoding out of movie files that had multiple encoding within them, where before I would get PCM by default. HOWEVER, I now get no sound out of my movie files, AC3, AVI and MP4. I tried removing the codec packs and the ac3filter and another splitter and still no sound. I tried installing the Shark007 codecs and still no sound for HDMI for my movies. Recorded TV and Live TV come through fine, even getting Dolby out of live TV.
Now I don't know what to do to get Windows Media Center back to playing any audio output for my MP4s, AVIs and AC3 files.
If anyone has any suggestions for getting WMC back to working, I am all ears.
I don't use any splitters or codecs... I don't have any MKV files, etc. However, it sounds to me like you could use system restore to go back to a point before you installed the splitter and codecs.