PVR 350 + Digital sound

[yucki]

Hi,

I have a asus pundit with a pvr 350 in it. The SPDIF output is optical, but my TV only has a coaxial input. Before I spend $70 buying a converter from optical to coaxial, can someone tell me:

If I play a DVD/DivX throught the PVR using the composite-out in the PVR, the sound goes through the SPDIF ? or only through the Composite-out ?
or in another way: is there any way to output digital audio while using the hardware acceleration provided by the PVR?


Hope you understand my prob, and thanks for any help.

[MaBo]

The PVR came (in my case) with a cable that has a TV-out like plug on one side (that goes into the out of the PVR) and four connectors on the other side. One is composite video, one is S-video the other two (red and white) are for the audio. Use these. Otherwise you will not get synchronised audio and video.
Greetings,
MaBo

[yucki]

Quote[/b] (MaBo @ Jan. 21 2004,12:05)]One is composite video, one is S-video the other two (red and white) are for the audio.

Meening that you only get stereo signal, no ?

[MaBo]

YES!
But as far as I know, the PVR can only do stereo. As soon as the audio card has to do more advanced things, sync may be lost.

BUT, I just think, that if you don't use the TV-Out of the PVR, but TV-Out of the ASUS Pundit (I have the same) plus the audio out of the on board sound, you may have sync and multi channel audio. However, I don't know how gbpvr behaves in that case. I like the tv-out of the pvr. (Otherwise I could just as well have bought the pvr250)
MaBo

[yucki]

Ok, let me try to understand...

the PVR 350 can display better image quality with the loss of 5.1 sound.
And cannot display the "desktop", so if I want to play a DVD with digital sound, I have to use the software decoder, and the not so great pundit tvout, and to see the live tv I have to use the Tv out from the pvr. Meaning that I do have to switch input (SCARTS) on my tv for each operation.

I cannot understand the usefullness of this.

[sub]

The decoder part of the PVR350 was only really designed to playback MPEG movies. It's not able to play DVDs, DiVX or play music files like .mp3 or .ogg. Its just not what hardware was designed to do.

To playback music through the TV connection of the PVR350 would involve me encoding the music stream (on the fly) to look like a movie file. Not very easy, but I might do it.

[sub]

Of course, you can do everything you want with software playback but then you wouldn't be using your PVR350's decoder at all.

Unfortunately its not a very flexible piece of hardware. Its great if you just want to record and playback mpeg video (normal PVR stuff), but it falls down if you want to be able to do more stuff with your HTPC.

[yucki]

thanks all for explaining it to me, but I still didn't get everything

I know that this surpasses GB-PVR, but if you could explain it, it would be great, cause I do have a pvr 350, and I would like to use it as much as I can.

I heard about overlays, and don't know if this applies here, but can I output my "desktop" using the pundit tvout, and play live tv using the PVR hardware acceleration in a window on that desktop? is in this situation that overlays are meant to be usefull?

or to use the pvr I always have to use the pvr tvout?

Thanks for your help

[MaBo]

Yucki,
As far as I know, you can only use the pvr hardware decoder when you watch tv via the pvr tvout.
As soon as you use a window on the windows desktop, you'll be using software decoding (of mpeg, dvd, divx etc.). The pvr is then only used as a tv-tuner card and if you're recording as mpeg encoder. You can then use the pundit's sound utilities to get 5.1 or whatever sound you like. Use the three small cinch connectors on the back for the six audio channels (see the pundit's documentation). Overlays are used for this as far as I know (haven't tried it with gbpvr though; with wintv it used to work).

MaBo

[sub]

yucki, no sorry the PVR350 hardware decoder cant be used to decode to a window on you desktop. Its a full screen tv out only card.