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[forbigd]

I have spent a few days trying to fix this, and I see no examples of the same problem, so I am writing to see if anyone has a fix.
I have the very latest (79) of MC. It runs on a superfast Win7 box. The connection to the Yamaha RX1030 is Coaxial, but HDMI has the same results. I have it set to no output change, no mixing, etc, and bitstreaming to SPDIF is enabled. In the Windows Sound panel I can test Dolby Digital and get 5 channels of output. If I play a DD movie it works fine. The Yamaha says DD and the sound is 5.1. If I play a normal 2ch MP3 it works fine. But if I try to play a 6 channel audio wav or flac it gives an error that playback can't be started on X , and if I wanted to switch from "32bit 48 kh 6ch" to "32 bit 48kh 2ch" it will work. Of course I don't want 2ch, I want all 6. There seems to be no setting that allows me to hear DTS audio without going into the DSP, turning it on, setting it to output to DD and then set it to 5.1 output. That works. The DTS is played in 5.1 and sounds great. But if I now go and play a movie or tv show that is stereo, I want the Yamaha to do the Dolby Pro Logic deal and direct sound to my 9.1 speakers. But the Yamaha says I can't as it is receiving a DD signal, so all signal processing for surround is turned off. So I have no center channel for tv and movies, and even if I have a high end signal like True Dolby HD, MC turns it into a 5.1 signal.
I want to have the output processing off, but still play DTS files like they play when in a video. I have tried HDMI, and get the same results. I built a completely different machine and it does the same thing.
Any Ideas? Anyone else get DTS files to play without enabling DSP output?
XBMC (Kodi) plays them fine. (Only a test ).   

Thanks
Don

[6233638]

The connection to the Yamaha RX1030 is Coaxial[…]
But if I try to play a 6 channel audio wav or flac it gives an error that playback can't be started[…]

S/PDIF connections do not have the bandwidth to support 6 channels of PCM audio.
They can support 2 channels of PCM, or 6 channels of AC3/DTS compressed audio.
 
I would suggest switching to HDMI, which supports up to 8 channels of PCM.

[forbigd]

Well I thought I understood it all. I thought coax spdif handled anything like HDMI.
The underlying issue is I have a pretty large network of tvs scattered around the house and garage. The HDMI does pass the proper signals to the Yamaha via HDMI (I may have said it didn't but that was under different circumstances) But once the signal goes through the Yamaha, all surround info is stripped out and I get Stereo. But by splitting the coax before the Yamaha I could have DD in other places by running coax. I already had a run to the garage. All was fine, but then I came across one I couldn't play, then the rest all seemed to have problems after that. After that I couldn't get anything past 2 channel out to play. By reconfiguring it all to feed the Yamaha with HDMI it works fine. A problem discovered is not all HDMI Distribution Amps are the same. Some don't like to pass DD, Some will if you convince them with the proper edid in port one, but if there is another amp down the line it may not work until it gets a reboot after the upstream amp is happy. So by isolating the run to the one other room (the garage) I wanted the full 5.1 in and splitting the output of the PC before the Yamaha, I get DD on both the Yamaha and the Denon in the garage.
Thanks for pointing me the right way.

Don

[6233638]

I would say that the best solution for this would probably be to use multiple zones then.
 
Have one zone configured to play stereo files as stereo, and bitstream AC3/DTS tracks.
Have a second zone configured to encode anything else (e.g. 6 channels of PCM) to Dolby Digital.
 
Set up Zone Switch to handle switching between them.

[bspachman]

...But if I try to play a 6 channel audio wav or flac it gives an error that playback can't be started on X , and if I wanted to switch from "32bit 48 kh 6ch" to "32 bit 48kh 2ch" it will work. Of course I don't want 2ch, I want all 6....
Any Ideas? Anyone else get DTS files to play without enabling DSP output?

Yep. My 6 channel WAVs work fine, with a couple caveats--foremost among them is that the DTS files were ripped from the short-lived format that encoded DTS data on a regular Redbook audio CD; my DD audio files came from god-knows-where, so YMMV depending on the source of your files.

Regardless, the fix that got me going was 2-pronged:

- I made sure that my files had the following extensions: ac3 for my 5.1 DD files; dts for my 5.1 DTS files. Note that they do NOT have the wav extension
- Then, in the MC Options dialog, navigate to the "File Types" section and make sure that the entries for AC3 audio and DTS audio are set to use the "JRiver Video Engine (using DirectShow filters)" as their playback method.
- You may also need to verify that the files are set to be "Media Type" = Audio in the tagging window, but if you initially imported them as WAVs, then depending on how you do the renaming, they should already be classified as Audio files.

Those 2 configurations allow me to use SPDIF bitstreaming in my playback zone. I used to remember the reason why the audio side of MC doesn't have access to the decoders on the video side, but regardless, keeping the playback method set to "Automatic" for those file types doesn't work.

And as 6233638 alludes to, this method probably won't work if you are dealing with uncompressed PCM data. It works for me because my audio files are the compressed DD/DTS data.

Hope this gets you pointed in the right direction...

Best,
Brad

[forbigd]

Hi,
Naming the wav files .DTS and setting the type to Video works fine...but... my gforce is gone... I guess since MC thinks it is playing a video now it doesn't allow gforce.

That's going to be a deal breaker... I need more than a greyed out MC logo.
But they do play fine..  Any ideas on how to get MC to allow visualizations setup this way?

Thanks

Don

[bspachman]

Nope--maybe someone else can weigh in who has more experience with the visualization engine, but I think it's tied to the audio side of things....

brad

[Hendrik]

Bitstreaming is generally not compatible with visualizations. If MC doesn't decode the audio, then it cannot create visualizations for it.