Just to get this out of the way .... I'm in love with j.river. Switched over to htpc as source for a couple of fairly high end and one definitely high end systems in my house I guess about 2.5 years ago. As I trudged through the learning curve and began to realize the limitations for audio and video quality in my original basic wmc based solution I'd hacked things more and more until I had lost a lot of the original convenience factor the central single interface provides. Since the writing is on the wall, so to speak, for mwc and microsoft's long term (lack of) support for it I've been trying out different solutions. XBMC and Media Portal look nice and have some fairly cool toys but they're really only just beginning to focus much attention on quality playback. I'd played with j.river a year or so ago but at the time wasn't actively looking for a replacement to wmc and just got back to it a couple of weeks ago.
Just finished converting my fairly large collection of bd rips from iso to folder structure (something I'd been wanting to do anyway) to make things work better in the j.river libraries and finally figured out that just setting video for Red October HQ and letting it do it's thing with lav and madvr gave better results than all of my screwing around with custom filter configs. I have a 70" Elite lcd in my 'big' room and the vid quality I'm getting now with good bd content is just jaw-dropping. I'm genuinely thrilled with it.
Anyway, finally to the point. Spent the first few weeks with j.river in trial mode while I was making sure there wasn't some deal breaker that it had or didn't have. For a couple of reasons I have wasapi using s/pdif to my processor for music and then bitstreaming for video soundtracks going via hdmi. This had been working perfectly .... just change the input on my processor depending on what I was doing and all was well.
So last weekend I decided to pull the trigger and bought a license (50 bucks is an absurd bargain when you consider how thoroughly mediocre the other commercial players are) and 'legitimized' j.river on two of my machines. Now I've been making a lot of changes to things lately so I wouldn't want stake my life on this but I'm almost sure I didn't make any other changes that would affect playback. By this point I was pretty much only working through library configuration stuff. However, after licensing, bit steaming of the hd audio tracks started giving errors .... basically saying my hardware didn't support it which it obviously does. I tried a couple of other players (daum and arcsoft) and they were now also having issues with bit streaming. Unfortunately this happened towards the end of the day when I just wanted s**t to work and wasn't what you would call methodical in my trouble shooting. Just kept banging away until I got it working again but I think what fixed it was uninstalling the sound devices in device manager and then just doing a scan for new hardware and letting windows do its thing.
So the issue I'm now left with is that I'm no longer able to have wasapi set to use s/pdif and video bit streaming set to hdmi. When I have it set that way I get my bit perfect audio over the digital input to my processor but if I then stop music, switch the input on the processor to hdmi and try to fire up a bd movie I get the hardware doesn't support this format message. If I go into settings and switch wasapi to use default or hdmi and then go back to the blu ray bit streaming works without a hitch. I can take this setting back and forth and the results are the same every time. It seems like, even though I have video bit-streaming set to use hdmi, that j.river is 'seeing' the limitations of the optical out (when wasapi is set to use it) and giving the error based on that .... but that's obviously just a guess. Keep in mind I was having no issues with this configuration prior to licensing but, also keep in mind, I am willing to admit I may have done something else at around the same time that's the actual culprit.
I've tried a number of things to get it working. Setting one or the other of the sound output to be the default and then trying different settings in j.river for audio and video output and believe I've done every possible permutation ..... even tried putting a different sound card in one box and disabling the optical out on the mobo. But ultimately, any setting that ends up having wasapi (I also tried asio to see if that made any difference and it didn't) going through the s/pdif results in me getting the errors when trying to bit stream for movies.
Since MC18 is coming out soon ..... and also since I'm so happy with j.river in every other respect .... I'm not all that concerned (the length of this post is not an indication of me being worked up over it .... I'm just kinda 'wordy'). But, thought it worth checking to see if anyone else had encountered something like this and had an easy solution. I did a number of searches but didn't get any hits that seemed to apply to my issue.