Need some help with Colossus Decoders

[rbmcgee]

Hi all,

I live in the US and have my Directv box feeding my Colossus via HDMI for both video and audio. Regardless of the station I tune to and regardless of what video format Directv uses, I know the video will get captured as H.264 and therefore to watch TV via NPVR I need to specify an h.264 decoder. This part works fine.

I'm not clear on what audio format is being captured and am running into problems getting audio consistently from all stations. What audio format(s) do I need to specify a decoder for and any recommendations for what decoders to use?

[Zeb]

Hi rbmcgee, while tuned to a "silent" channel you can right-click and move mouse pointer to Audio Stream, where "Track 1 [format]" should answer your question. With HDMI I believe it might be AAC, or else AC3. If you have WinTV installed, then you might already have decoders installed. I use AC3Filter myself, but it does not support AAC. [Edit] An old thread causes me to think that WinTV includes an Arcsoft decoder for AAC. Hello again whurlston!

[whurlston]

AC-3 recording from AC-3 source
AAC audio encoding from PCM source

[rbmcgee]

Thanks guys. So I guess some channels would be AC3 and some channels might be AAC so I need to specify decoders for both of those fields. Here's a twist to my question. I am feeding the signal to various places via the client/server setup. Some of those places are computers with regular stereo speakers attached so I need to convert the signal to stereo output. Also, these other computers do not have any card installed so installing wintv and/or arcsoft software on those machines is not possible. Any advice on decoders for the client machines? Also, I would guess I need to specify settings within decoders to output analog stereo.

[whurlston]

LAV filters will decode both AC3 and AAC. After selecting the decoder, hit the "..." button beside it to bring up the decoder's property page then unselect all the bitstream formats.

[rbmcgee]

Thanks again.

I'm trying the LAV audio filters for ac3 and aac and they seem to be working pretty well although I haven't run through all the channels yet. Is there any potential conflict between LAV for audio and the MS DTV-DVD decoder for h.264 video (I'm using the patch to allow the MS decoder on W7)

[sub]

Is there any potential conflict between LAV for audio and the MS DTV-DVD decoder for h.264 video

No, that should be fine.