Dolby Digital Live output

[Gigantor]

I'm sure capone's setup works perfectly. In this case, the ffdshow software is doing pretty much the same job as the dolby digital cards I described. If all you want to do is enjoy 5.1 from a player that uses ffdshow, then this solution sounds perfectly fine. But, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think it's possible to force ffdshow to process the sound for every application. Games in particular would still be stuck in stereo.

For nitrogen_widget, if you want to output a single digital signal to an external decoder, then you would need a soundcard that supports passing on an unprocessed dolby digital signal. I'm afraid I dont know which cards can do this, besides the ones I've already mentioned.

[nitrogen_widget]

Ok. on the 5.1

the other question I had was about 4 channel dolby pro-logic.
would that surround signal coming from my sattelite receiver over the left & right component cables be present on recordings when sent back out to my prologic receiver using the sound cards speaker out?
Would it also work with DVD's?

[capone]

I just use my setup for video, but ffdshow can be used to handle almost any audio your system uses.

The DVDs I play have edolby surround if they are encoded w/ it. Think of what I am doing as makign my system act like you DVD stand-alone player. All my system/ffdshow is doing is passing, and only passing, the number of channels there is in the encoded audio. The reciever is doing the rest, and passing it around. Just plugging the sound card in the receiver w/o something handing the audio over to the output as separtate channels, the reciever is just going to handle it like a bunch of sound to play.

[KingArgyle]

Correct....FFDShow will only work if a codec graph is being built. It won't work for games, you need a card that has hardware encoding of all streams to 5.1 regardless of where they come from.

[nbarsley]

I just wanted to add my experience with the x-mystique with dolby digital live. This card is absolutely amazing. The optical output is great because it runs directly into my HT system. But the sound is so clear and the surround sound works perfectly (judging from "The Matrix" test). My HT system instantly picked up the dolby digital signal as well as the 5.1 signal. Before this card I was using an old Sound Blaster Live! Value with the digital output to my HT. Mp3's always sounded very muddy if they were playing on all speakers (through PLII). With the X-Mystique the sound is somehow properly distributed thoughout all 5.1 speakers without any echo/delay type effects.