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Dolby Digital Live frustration

C

cjv998

n00b
Joined
Dec 3, 2006
Messages
52
Hi everyone. I have an Auzentech X-fi Forte sound card (uses Creative's x-fi chipset), and I'm using Dolby Digital Live to encode games' 5.1 surround sound so it can be sent over SPDIF.

However, any time I want to play a game, I have to enable Dolby Digital Live in my sound card's software, then switch my default audio device from SPDIF to Speakers (DDL requires the audio output to be set to Speakers to work correctly). And obviously, when I'm done playing a game, and let's say I want to watch a DVD, I need to disable DDL and switch my output back to SPDIF. This gets aggravating really quickly, especially because the whole reason I bought the card was so I wouldn't have to do stupid stuff like this.

I e-mailed Auzentech, and they haven't been helpful yet. So I figured I'd see if anyone here has found a way to solve this problem. Thanks!

EDIT: Here are a few thoughts that I've had:

I haven't tried DTS Connect much, maybe that could fix this?

Also, maybe I should just use the analog outputs from the sound card for games. Maybe there's actually less distortion there than I'd get converting the 5.1 into 2-channel output, then converting back to 5.1 again when it gets to the receiver. Any opinions there? (The only issue there is I'd have to switch all my games to use the analog outputs, because they're set to use the digital output now I think.) The more I think about it, the more I like this idea actually.

UPDATE: I decided to try out using my analog outputs from my sound card. Now all I have to do when I want to play a game is press one button on my receiver's remote to enable the 7.1 analog input, and press it again when I'm done to switch back. Much better than having to change two settings on my computer that are in separate menus. I haven't noticed any loss in sound quality either; sounds pretty similar to before when I was using DDL. It'd be nice if I could get this stuff fully automated so I didn't have to do these things, but I guess HTPC technology isn't quite to that point yet.
 
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For music I use Winamp, and for videos I use Media Player Classic - Homecinema edition with the ffdshow plugins, both of which are outputting the audio through the optical output of my soundcard (Winamp is getting upsampled to 24 bit, 96kHz; not sure what's happening to the Dolby/DTS signals in MPC-HC; I actually need to do some messing around with my ffdshow settings later anyway, maybe I'll look into that).
 
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It sounds like in your audio settings for FFDShow you have SPDIF out for DTS and AC3 on. Turn those off when you're running dolby digital live. It can cause problems.
 
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