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[Archimedianite]

Background:
After two years building a HT and now a HTPC to drive it, I am trying out MC 17.  I have an ASUS Xonar D2X card that I have been using, but it was limited to 5.1 decoding for movies. I found a way to get DTS-HD 7.1 through TMT, but was unsuccessful in getting TrueHD to work. I also needed a convenient way to time align my side and rear speakers, among some other things. MC 17 looked like a good way to handle this.

System is AMD Phenom II X4, ASUS MB, 4GB RAM, Sapphire 5850, Xonar D2X, Windows 7 x64

After reading the Xonar posts, I decided to give it a try. I downloaded the latest Xonar D2X drivers they had on their website. I was unable to get ASIO working (spent quite a while messing with output channels and for some reason had noise in one channel), but had better success with WASAPI, but sometimes heard pops and sound stuttering. DirectSound was more reliable.

I decided to try the Uni 1.60 drivers. After installing, swapping LFE/C and physically swapping the SS with RS channels, I achieved some success. I was able to get very clean sound with my movies, and correctly decoded TrueHD.

Problems:
On some movies, (not all) I noticed a lip sync problem. I reloaded the Uni drivers with low DSP latency checked and this improved, but found it still visible on a few movies, though I haven't checked that many. The D2X decodes DD and DTS 5.1 via hardware. Am I forgoing that now by using MC? I only need MC to decode 7.1. Come to think of it, the sync problem only occurs on 5.1 movies so far. I am upsampling via MC, maybe I'll turn that off and see if that helps.

The biggest problem I have is that I can no longer watch TV. I was receiving the audio from my cable box via the S/PDIF in channel, but now I cannot not hear it via Line-in or S/PDIF. I have checked the uni driver settings and no matter what I set, I cannot receive any audio inputs. This happened as soon as I installed MC, regardless of the Xonar driver installed. Has anyone else had this problem with D2X cards?

BTW, I am really impressed with this software--assuming I can solve these last problems.

The HTPC is networked for convenience, but I only plan to run MC in theater mode once I resolve these issues, so if anyone knows of some optimizations I could make that would be good. I turned off Aero themes, backgrounds etc.

[JimH]

Try WASAPI Event Style or change the buffer (lower may be better) to eliminate the pops.

Try MC's Videoclock feature for the lip sync problem.

Could you post the TV problem separately on the TV board?  Yaobing will see it there.  This looks like the same problem:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=71912.msg486411#msg486411

[Archimedianite]

Thanks for responding,

ASIO is the best solution right now. The TV problem exists regardless of what setting I have. WASAPI doesn't really solve anything. The uni board has pretty much solved the lip syncing problem. I just have two movies that seem to have problems, but even these aren't that bad. If you don't pay attention to it, you don't really notice it.

Thanks for the link, I am reading it now.

[Archimedianite]

I have solved the lip sync problem. The one movie that still has trouble I suspect is a bad rip to mkv. The BD version plays fine. All BD's and DVD's I have checked play without lip sync problems, and 17 of my mkv's except this particular one does (haven't had time to check all 50+). I can live with this.  BTW, this one also has lip sync trouble under WASAPI and Direct Sound (only noticeable when you have close-ups of a face while talking).

The Uni-Xonar driver web page really helped to optimize the windows 7 system.

Still working on the TV problem. It is not really a TV problem, but rather an S/PDIF-in or Line-in problem, as I have neither working at the moment.

[Archimedianite]

Line-in solved. Still no SPDIF-in, but I don't think this is an issue with MC.

Consider this thread closed.