Sound Card for Blu Rays

monkentage

monkentage

monkentage

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I was looking though the sound cards on the Ocuk website and noticed none of them play the HD audio that comes on Blu Rays. Do I need to buy an AV reciever or is there a suitable sound card available for playing HD audio?
 
HD audio is just lossless audio that has not been compressed. A CD holds lossless audio. Any sound card can play audio from a CD, just as any sound card can play so called "HD audio" found on Blu-ray's. It's a stupid term, when applied to audio, that just confuses people.

If someone is watching a Blu-ray on a PC, then the software is decoding these lossless audio formats. Dolby TrueHD, and the DTS equivalent.

It's not much different from watching a DVD on a PC, except they use Dolby Digital and DTS, which are lossy formats. The software decodes the tracks, and whatever sound card is present in the PC, will play that audio.
 
Okay thanks.

I thought I read somewhere that unless a card supports the copy protection used in lossless audio it down-samples it to DVD quality. I can't remember where I read it though.
 
AFAIK, sound does not come under the HDCP compliance requirements. I've not seen sound listed in the software that tests whether a PC's components are HDCP compliant.
 
If you are talking about decoding the DTS HD audio 192kHz/24 bit audio tracks to an analog output then you are correct, unless the card is HDCP compliant it will downsample to 48KHz. Whether you can actually tell the difference in practice I do't know.

If you look at the latest version of powerDVD specifications it lists soundcards that are compatable with it.

http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdvd/spec_en_GB.html

The analog solutions are on board realtek and via chipsets. The rest use HDMI passthrough. The other commercial BD software players may have other cards listed - I think Total Media Theatre can use an Azuntech card.

If you can find a card that can decode to analog without downsampling I would be interested in it.

Asus Xonar HDAV Slim PCI adevertised here doesn't have analog outputs.
 
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Interesting that the Xonar HDAV isn't listed. I'd be interested to know if PowerDVD will work with the HDAV cards, given that they are not listed. I'm surprised that only onboard audio is HDCP compliant, when it comes to analogue output.

It's almost funny that someone playing a Blu-ray on a PC, can get access to lossless audio with onboard audio, but can't with a sound card such as a Xonar D2/X.

I can see why people rip their Blu-ray's to HDD, so they don't have to put up with the stupidity that is HDCP.
 
It is suprising as the asus card can pass the HD audio through, could be a licencing thing between Cyberlink and Asus.

Realtek avertise their chips as having content protection.
 
An MKV will preserve whatever you want it to. MKV is a container, it can CONTAIN any number of streams from video and audio to subtitles. If you create an MKV with your program of choice and tell it to save the video and audio streams without any re-encoding or down-sampling then that's exactly what it will do.

Basically it will take a Blu-ray m2ts (also a container which happens to contain an MPEG2/VC-1/h264 video file and various audio formats) file and remux it into an MKV container.
 
Thanks for that. I realise mkv is just a container, I've used megui in the past but wasn't sure if it could get round the content protection.

Whats best to rip the blu ray? Apologies if thats a question I'm not allowed to ask here.
 
I don't think there is a problem, as long as the Blu-ray's have been bought. The media companies would probably argue against this being legal, but then people rip CD music to MP3 players, and that is also illegal, apparently. That hasn't stopped people talking about it. I don't know whether they have since changed their stance on it, since digital media is far more common nowadays. I think it should be perfectly legal for someone to rip a film or music they have bought on physical media, as long as it is for their own use.

Anyway, here is a thread you can get some info from. Home Cinema...ripping blu rays to HDD...best way??
 
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