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[RBeam]

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.

[JimH]

If you've selected the audio sound devices correctly, I don't know what the problem is.  But one thing to keep in mind is that SP/DIF has a lower bandwidth and won't do multi-channel audio except for DTS, which is compressed.

Thanks for the (mostly) kind words.

[RBeam]

Only giving praise where praise is due.

In all cases for any kind of movie playback video settings indicated that the audio should be going through hdmi but it just seems like j.river 'thinks' that it's not.

The way it's set now I basically leave everything alone in the video settings ... bit steaming, hdmi ... and whatever else. With sound settings output mode wasapi I set output mode settings/output device to hdmi (or default which is hdmi) and play a movie dts hd, dolby hd etc fire up without pause. Stop movie, go into sound settings and set the output device to s/pdif, go pack to movie and hit play .... format not supported. It's totally reproducible. Like flipping a switch.

But, as I said, it's not a big deal. In that system my ocd had me to where I was using wmc for tv, winamp via wasapi for audio and daum with lav and madvr for video. Only thing that made it barely livable is the gyration remote I have has air mouse functionality so I didn't have to get my ass up off the couch every time I wanted to change something. The degree of inconvenience this presents is very minor in comparison and I'm pretty sure I'll get it figured out eventually.

[mbagge]

I think that you have to use the same approach as many others do. Use zones to differentiate audio settings.
I have an "Audio" zone and a "Video" zone. When selected I can do specific settings on where to output and in which format.

All I have to do when I want to listen to music is to select the Audio zone first and if I want to watch a video, select the Video zone first.
In a future build it might be possible to link media types to specific zones or configuration sets.

[RBeam]

I hadn't made it to the 'z's in the wiki yet so I'll play around with that.

Thing is, though, I had just done a fairly big speaker upgrade right before I started fooling around with j.river as a front end so I've been doing A LOT of music listening and movie watching on that system. And up until last weekend when I did whatever it was I did (whether it was related to registration or something else that slipped my mind) it was working fine just setting the wasapi to use the optical out and bit stream/movies to use hdmi. Just had to switch the input on my pre/pro depending on what I was doing and that was it.

I'll give what you suggested a shot though ... as long as the end result is the same I don't really care how I get there. Thanks.

[RBeam]

Hey .... you rock!

When I first read your thing about using the zones I thought you might be confused and think I was actually trying to set up dlna or some other room where I wanted sound ... but didn't want to say as much until I'd done due diligence and tried it out. But it does the trick. It's a little confusing bouncing around the different 'players' initially but seems like it has the added benefit that I can leave my pre/pro in auto mode (for input type) and it just automatically picks up the new signal and switches when I change players.

Thanks!

[dean70]

I had a similar issue - resolved it by setting the HDMI output as the default device in Windows & can switch between HDMI audio out and DVI->HDMI video with SPDIF coax audio by switching inputs on receiver and back again. You will probably find in JRiver options screen, the HDMI output has reset back to 'default device'.

Usually you will find when you switch inputs on receiver the HDMI audio out device disappears from Device Manager in Windows.

[RBeam]

Yeah, I know what you're talking about with the disappearing hdmi in the sound control panel. I've had that happen on and off well before this thing with j.river. This is something different though. I can create the error situation and then 'fix' it repeatedly by just changing the wasapi ouput device setting and touching nothing in the windows sound control panel. Not sure why it wasn't happening before then started but the zone suggestion by mbagge is a great workaround and I think I'll let this particular little house of cards stand for a while before I start screwing with it and bring the whole thing down again.