Advantage of sound via HDMI ?

ferret face

ferret face

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Anyone know what advantages there are to having sound pass through the HDMI interface of a pc to HDTV?

Is it any differnet than just running a cable via RCA for sound?

Cheers

Ferret
 
straight to a tv no, there's little advantage if any. if your using an av amp its a different story as the amp can process HD audio at bitrates far higher than spfif can handle....but then you're using a pc, which currently cant send anything better than spdif-compatible standard DD and DTS over hdmi anyway. so its a big fat no then:p



oh there is one advantage if anything - little chance of interference from outside sources causing hum or hissing, like you may get using analogue RCA's:)
 
only the advantage of using 1 cable. as i mentioned, nothing from a pc can pass anything other than regular DD or DTS over hdmi right now so its a pointless endevour really:)
 
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What about outputting them over optical or digital coax for an amp to process?
 
you cant because spdif doesnt have the encryption or the bandwidth available to to it. its not a software issue its hardware, or lackthereof - there is no hardware available for the pc that can output DTS: MA or DD True HD in any form other than analogue right now:) the hdmi solutions we have right now arent capable of it unfortunately.
 
This has confused me a bit:confused:

So does this make it a bit pointless setting up a HTPC with Blu-Ray, would I be better off using a standalone player or a PS3 then?
 
you can still use analogue if you have a decent enough sound card. although having both, the ps3 is just the better hd player all round at the moment.
 
There are a couple of PC solutions that let you output your audio as LPCM via HDMI, the Asus P5E-VM is one for example.
I'll always use HTPC's for the sheer flexibility of what they can do but there's no denying that they have really been left well behind by standalone equipment recently. I couldn't do without my PS3 now.
 
I'm really confused...

can you explain why HTPC's are getting left behind?

The reason I ask is that the only reason I want a HDTV is so i can hook up a pc to it and play rips of all my dvd's and some HD movies that will be stored on my hard drive.

Is there a better solution than a HTPC for this.

Regards from a confused Ferret

:)
 
Well there's the audio problem we see here where you have to use analog output because there's a lack of proper HDMI support. Further to this audio codec support is just plain poor and finicky, even if you're using PowerDVD which always like to downmix and downsample unless you play around a lot.
For video you need more CPU than a HTPC should really have for high bitrate AVC unless you go with DXVA which is very restrictive as to your choice of OS and software and produces worse results than software decoders. And if you want deinterlacing and processing that compares to even lowend standalones and displays you need to mess about with ffdshow and avisynth scripts for untold amounts of time.

You can buy a PS3 for less than £300 which will give you trouble free BD playback and excellent DVD playback and upscaling.
 
I thought you could use optical connections from a pc to amp for sound, they are digital arent they?

Surely if sound is poor on pc then why do so many people have HTPCs?

sorry for all the questions, I'm just trying to get my head round what is best for me

Cheers Ferret
 
Not enough bandwidth for the HD audio codecs on the regular digital out.
I didn't say sound was poor, support for the HD codecs is just horribly implemented and patchy at best. The number of people with HTPC's is miniscule.
 
optical (spdif) will output a standard Dolby Digital or DTS soundtrack off a normal DVD with ease. whats been said is that spdif doesnt physically have enough bandwidth on it to output a Dolby Digital True HD or DTS: MA soundtrack (the kind you get on HD-DVD's and Blu-Rays). Thats where HDMI comes into play as that has enough bandwidth for the high def video content plus the high def soundtrack.

Not quite sure how this next bit works but I think with HD-DVD's, powerDVD downsamples the high def soundtracks to plain old 5.1 that can be sent over spdif. However, it seems that you can't do this with Blu-Ray's and powerDVD and so you get stuck with standard 2.0 stereo. I think its something to do with the soundtracks that are included on the disk?? but best askin someone who knows more about that bit for a decent answer :)
 
I'm a complete noob compared to most people on here, but I've just upgraded my HTPC to Hi Def. The HTPC is connected to the TV by HDMI but the soundcard is connected to a NAD L70 amp. by toslink.
While playing around with the config. (watching Planet earth) I switched to S/Pdif and the sound was truly astonishing. The only thing is, I don't really know what I did!
 
Well surely it would be better to have hdmi going to your amp, then the tv? or just having a good sound card like a Juli@? (not Xonar though)
 
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