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[Mastiff]

I have all my equipment in the attic, with a bunch of cheap 10 year old surround receivers. They take care of the multizone audio, with speaker cables run to the different rooms. 10 zones at the moment, with a mixture of sound cards - separate sound cards for the three critical zones (the wake-up system which goes to the master bedroom and the two kids' room's zones) and kX driver SoundBlasters being "virtual" sounds cards for the rest. But the computer that runs this has developed a fatal flaw: When the power is out for a few moments (which happens from time to time, especially in the fall because of strong wind or in the winter because of heavy snow on the wires) the thing refuses to start up again automatically. It's not the BIOS battery. So this is a perfect excuse to get a new computer which I hope will last me some years. The previous one made it for 6 years, after all. And simply doing the same thing all over again so sooo boring. Time to take it to the next level... I have two 24" LCD monitors with HDMI as TV's in the kitchen and master bedroom here (via a HDMI Matrix) and I will probably get a couple of more flatscreens for the kids' rooms in the forseable future, with the prices we have now. For the living room and home theater I'll stay analogue. The Panasonic 36" TV in the living room, fed with 476p over component from a digital satellite receiver give a picture that's much more pleasing to my eyes than anything south of OLED, which is a bit delayed at the moment.. And the Barco CRT projector will be there as long as it lives. Since I bought a new set of tubes four years ago that probably means 10-15 years with my regular use, and I'll still use the special HTPC for that one since I run FFDShow scripts that are so heavy that nothing else moves on the PC. But still it means that I will have the possibility for four zones for video over HDMI within a year or two. Which started me thinking.

One problem with multizone is that the way sound cards is assigned probably uses enumeration. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that to me is the only way to explain why many or all zones go out of whack if a sound card isn't there at MC startup. That means that a small glitch in USB on startup is enough to change the order of them, and that messes up the system very badly. Which is why I can't use USB sounds cards. And of course I would like to use my old sound cards since they work perfectly. So  I want to buy a motherboard with as many PCI slots as I can find. In this age of PCI-E that means four for anything else than a hysterically expensive server card. By shopping one PCI-E sound card I will be at the same level as my old Asus P4P800-E, which has five PCI slots. No problems so far.

But that's where that future and planning for it comes in. I started looking at the options and found out that Gigabyte has a motherboard called GA-P55-UD3L, with 4 PCI slots, one PCI-E for a sound card and two for gracphics cards, plus a built-in graphics card with HDMI! That's what I call fully loaded. With an i7 CPU I figure I should be able to do at least four ripped 720p movies at the same time without any stutter. Well, at least I hope so. In other words one from the built-in graphics card, one from one of the extra cards I'll get (I have a few Radeon HD of different generations laying around that I can use) and then... Right. And then. I know I can get MC to play several video streams at the same time from experimenting with my carputer system, but that was with regular VGA output. So my questions are these:

1. Is there anything that can stop me from sending two 720p video streams out from the same card?

2. Will the HDMI audio on the two ports of a graphic card be adressable as two zones, or do I have to go for using regular sound cards on one of them?

3. Are there any other fatal flaws in my thinking that are so obvious that they should be pointed out to me before I make an idiot of myself?

[glynor]

Hey there, Mastiff!

1. Is there anything that can stop me from sending two 720p video streams out from the same card?

Assumuing that you are NOT including AACS-protected stuff (and/or other forms of DRM), then the only thing limiting you would really be memory, CPU, and decode filter performance.  My Core i5 750 @ 4.0GHz machine can handle dual simultaneous H264 1080p renders (one on each monitor).  I do occasionally hit disk performance issues right when starting the files up at the same time as one another, though (light stuttering just in the first 1-3 seconds and/or a longer-than normal loading delay).  Of course, many of my HD rips and recordings are pretty high bitrate (10-14mbps).  I don't know if you'd get more than that, though.  I've never tried.

Decoding all of that stuff is going to be pretty hard on a server's system, though.  Saying for sure would be impossible without trying, but you have a very good shot at getting 4 files decoding at once.

2. Will the HDMI audio on the two ports of a graphic card be adressable as two zones, or do I have to go for using regular sound cards on one of them?

Not sure what cards specifically you are going to use, but a few things:

1. There will almost certainly only be one audio "device" per card, regardless of how many HDMI or DVI ports the cards offer.  My Radeon HD 6870 only has one.

2. Older video cards have varying degrees of HDMI audio support, ranging from none at all, to limited support.  If you are going to use these for anything other than media playback (sounds like no) then you could hit issues with multi-channel audio, unless the card is carefully selected.  Many of them do not support full multichannel PCM bitstreaming, and some don't have Dolby "Live" Encoders, which means they can only pass AC3 or DTS through, otherwise they are effectively 2-channel sound cards.  This may or may not be a problem depending on the "reciever" you use at the other end, and how you want it to handle things.

3. You'll basically need Nvidia's GTX 4x0+ or AMD Radeon HD 5x00 to support bitstreaming Dolby TrueHD or DTS-MA if you have a way to decode that.  If you care at all, only the very latest generation (AMD 6x00 or Nvidia 5x0 series) support HDMI 1.4, for the funny looking glasses.

[glynor]

PS. I do use CoreAVC for AVC decode.  I can't speak to what kind of performance you'll see out of ffdshow.  It used to be dismal, but it might be vastly improved now.  You probably know better than I.

[Mastiff]

Thanks, Glynor! Looks like it's worth trying out. I won't be doing anything more advanced than regular DD or DTS, and not 3D either, thanks. As for AVC I use Core as well. The FFDShow is to upsample regular DVD's and that's only necessary on the big screen in the HT.

[csimon]

Forgive me if I'm overlooking something obvious! But wouldn't a dedicated DLNA media renderer (such as a WD TV Live box) for each zone work for your purposes, without having to rely on a powerful PC, with multiple graphics and sound cards?   As far as I can see the only disadvantage would be that you couldn't have the zones playing the same thing in sync, is that important?

How are you actually controlling the system, is it via client PCs running MC at each zone?

[Mastiff]

It probably would, but it would be more expensive (since computers are subsidized by my office), and yes, I want something that can sync for parties.

And no, the system is controlled with Windows Mobile phones (6.5, not the new bull that's so locked down) running NetRemote.

[glynor]

Ha!  Mastiff and I had this discussion LONG, LONG ago before there even was a DLNA standard (referencing it being cheaper/easier to simply build multiple HTPC around the house).  He has his reasons.    

[Mastiff]

So you remember? Good, old days...