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[johncaul]

Hi all, I'm trying to get MC to output video over HDMI only but audio over HDMI and SPDIF simultaneously. The rationale is i have a high end audio system i listen to occasionally and a movie system which is also good enough for every day music listening. I've been playing with zones, zone link and zone switch and thought I'd cracked it. i've set up 3 zones- zone 1 plays video only zone 2 plays music only through hdmi and zone 3 plays music only through spdif. Zones 2 and 3 are linked. When playing a video first, stopping playback then an audio file everything works as it should- i get simultaneous music through HDMI and SPDIF. However when playing audio then a video the audio playback works but when i play a movie i get an error message (Linked zones only support audio playback. Would you like to unlink the zone and continue playback.). I can manually go into the zones to start playback and it works, but it's a pain and no good for when i use theatre view. Any suggestions on either what's going wrong or on how to configure MC to play video over hdmi only and audio over spdif and hdmi simultaneously would be gratefully received.

I currently run version 19
Thanks
John

[johncaul]

i've been playing with this over the past few days. It's annoying! I can get music playing over HDMI and SPDIF simultaneously, but when i try and play a movie i get the error message i mentioned below (Linked zones only support audio playback. Would you like to unlink the zone and continue playback.). I don't understand why- i have zone switch set up so movies shouldn't play through the linked zones. I think there might be a bug in the way zone switch is set up, it's like MC tries to play a file in the linked zones before it looks at what zone switch tells it to do. Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

Thanks
John

[johncaul]

I'm bumping this. I'm on 19.0.56 and it's still an issue. I'm pretty sure it's a bug; otherwise why does MC switch from watching a movie to listening to music but gives an error message when going from music to a movie?

John

[glynor]

I think I've posted on something like this before too.

The core issue is that you can't link zones for video playback.  I get why (syncing the video playback would be very difficult, and how would you determine where to send the video or which "zone" wins, when both have a display).  It doesn't really have anything to do with SPDIF and HDMI outputs in particular.  There is no way to link zones when you are playing video.

However, it would be convenient to have a solution.  I can think of a few circumstances when this would be handy.  For example:

I have a new receiver that has multiple zone support.  I'd like to be able to hook up some speakers in the kitchen, so that when I'm cooking, I can listen to stuff.  This works fine if I want to listen to something other than what is being watched in the living room.  It also works fine for audio-only playback.  But, if I want to watch a show in the Living Room, and have the audio from that show routed to the kitchen too, then there isn't a simple or elegant way to accomplish this from inside MC*.  This is probably the most common multi-room setup needed out there, honestly.  You can see the TV from the Kitchen, and don't really care much anyway, but just don't want to miss the dialog (or keep listening to the news) when you get up to get a new bourbon and ginger (or, you know, cooking).  My parent's house has this kind of setup, but MC couldn't easily run this kind of thing.

In these circumstances, the video itself doesn't matter.  You just want the audio to go to the "secondary zone".  Perhaps the zone system could be modified to simply allow this (drop the video on any "linked zone").  It would be super-cool if you could also link video zones on separate machines (through MCWS), so that you could have a setup where you play a video all over the whole house, and it is playing in any room where you walk in (assuming those zones are driven by separate PCs and copies of MC), but that seems like an extreme edge-case, and no reason to "hold back" audio-only video playback on secondary zones.  MC knows how to handle the audio routing and sync already, so the "kitchen zone" setup is the low-hanging-fruit.

* Since my Living Room setup is a 5.1 setup and my amp is a 7.1 amp, I could use the extra two channels on the HDMI to pull it off, but this requires some fancy routing in both MC and on my receiver.  You could do the same thing by splitting the Front L/R channel input if you use analog outs from the PC, but this would also be clunky.

[johncaul]

hi glynor, thanks for taking the time to reply in such detail. My problem is probably much less complex than the scenarios you outlined, i also understand that MC can't link zones for video playback. I'm trying to get simultaneous audio only output through spdif and hdmi- MC does this- i can get it to do it no problem using zone link. I also want MC to output video via HDMI to another zone- again MC does this without any problems. The next step is to get zone switch to allocate any audio files to the linked zones and video files to the dedicated video zones. MC does this as long as i'm playing a video file first, i.e. select a video file, play it, it goes to the correct zone, i play an audio file they go to the linked zones. BUT if I'm playing an audio file through the linked zones, stop playback then try and play a video file zone switch pings up the error message i mentioned in my previous post. So i'm not trying to get MC to do anything it can't already do, it's just zone switch doesn't seem to kick in when i'm playing files in linked zones. I don't think i'm missing anything, it seems like a bug or something that needs fixing behind the scenes?

Cheers
John

[csimon]

I don't know, but I might have stumbled on something similar. I had 3 zones, one audio and two video. I'm not linking any of them but I tried to set up zoneswitch rules to direct all audio to the audio zone and video to one of the two video zones, depending on the type of video. I was sure everything was mutually exclusive but I couldn't reliably get zoneswitch to switch to a video zone if the current zone was audio. I wasn't getting any error message but the video would play in the currently selected audio zone. I suspect it might be the same situation, it's just that in my case the audio zone could play the video so that's what it did, but in your case the settings weren't compatible so it throws an error. All symptomatic of zoneswitch not kicking in and the video playing in the wrong zone. Just a guess!

[johncaul]

Hi csimon, thanks for your input. I've tried to replicate your issue, but without success- that is everything seems to work as it should! Zone switch seems to work fine as long as linked zones aren't involved. Have you tried your set up with the latest MC version?

I think the fault lies with the zone switch function, it should kick in before MC decides whether or not a file is compatible for playing in a particular zone. Instead it seems as though MC checks if a file type is compatible with a particular zone, then moves to zone switch to filter where something should be played. Like you i'm just guessing here. It's frustrating because all of the individual components of what i'm trying to do work, it's just they don't play nice together!

John