ffdshow and games

Auraomega · 11 Apr 2011 at 00:46

I'm back looking for ways to do multi-channel encoding over S/PDIF again and would like to know if ffdshow can be used by all games or just a select few? I've read some people have managed to get ffdshow to work with Oblivion (actually, it didn't work as expected, hence the ease of finding threads). If it's possible to get ffdshow working in all games then it's a step forward to getting that sweet on-the-fly 5.1 encoding without a sound card

cjkennedy · 11 Apr 2011 at 12:02

dolby digital live and dts connect are your best bet although i think you can only use that if your sound card/ onboard sound comes with the softawre as i dont think its available otherwise, might be worth investing in a cheap sound card for it though as it works very well

Auraomega · 11 Apr 2011 at 12:14

I know that's possible however I'm trying to find a free alternative, there are a lot of people who don't want to spend money on a card when their AVR will be doing the DAC processing, that plus I'm planning on buying a HDMI AVR in the near future so the card would just go to waste I'm afraid.

Chiribo · 11 Apr 2011 at 13:44

Although I have a HDMI receiver, I still used coax output for my 5.1 audio. Nothing that I acquired to watch via the PC would really have audio that couldn't fit into the coax bandwidth.

I've not really played about with the HDMI output from gfx cards though although I would be somewhat interested in finding out how useful/less it is. Was very definitely useless when I tried to have my tv as a 3rd monitor output via the AVR.

Auraomega · 11 Apr 2011 at 15:17

S/PDIF (whether optical or coaxial) only has enough bandwidth for stereo PCM, to send multi-channel audio it needs to be encoded into a lossy format (usually DTS these days). HDMI on the other hand has enough bandwidth for (I believe) up to 7.1 PCM as well as 120hz video (HDMI 1.4). Using S/PDIF is fine for movies where the audio stream is usually pre-encoded into DTS or DD however for games where all sound is PCM you only get stereo, hence where HDMI has the advantage.