Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HUD in stages

I've been holding off on a bluray player because I can't yet afford an HD capable receiver. I am wondering if I could still benefit from upgraded video by picking up a player for my HTPC and living with downgraded audio.

Do bluray discs contain regular 5.1 tracks for those that cannot decode HD audio yet? If I can maintain my current sound quality and upgrade the on screen image it would be worth it. Unfortunately this HTPC protected path stuff is quite convoluted.

My current setup is an older based on a Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H mobo with hdmi 1.1 out to the display and optical out to the receiver.

My concern is that the I will be forced to use the on-board graphics chipset to down-sample the HD audio stream and that may not work so well.

Can anybody here enlighten me??

If your receiver has analog inputs and you buy a Blu-ray player that has analog outputs and decodes the formats DTS HDMA and Dolby TrueHD internally then you are covered for the lossless soundtracks. This is what I do with my Panasonic BD55.

And yes Blu-ray disks contain both the standard soundtrack as well as the lossless soundtrack.

The mobo does have analog out, but if I go this route I am forced to go through the onboard graphics and it will downsample to 16 bit before sending it to the analog outs. I do not think there is a way around this.

Sounds like I can continue to do optical out though. Thats good news.

What player did you end up going with?

I use the Panasonic BD55 for Blu-ray/DVD and it is awesome. The new OPPO Blu-ray player has all the bells and wistles as well and will fit anyones needs. There is a big thread on that model here.

Oops, just realized that you are using an external player. I am looking at an internal drive for my HTPC

Fred, yes the Blu-ray discs contain audio tracks besides those using lossless compression. These are at a higher bit rate(640Kbps)than the DD tracks(448Kbps)on regular DVDs. It's been discussed here a couple times, but if you haven't studied it, the Home Entertainment Magazine tests , blind and otherwise, done last year should be read. The bottom line was that the difference between the higher rate DD tracks and the HD tracks was so small as to be inaudible in most cases. So, if you want to go that way, don't worry about the audio being "downgraded" to a significant extent if neither your player nor your receiver can decode the HD formats.

Thanks John. I do remember reading that now. My main concern is avoiding audio reprocessing by windows. It looks like an ATI Radion 4650 and bluray player will do that.

Following up at AVS forum it looks like Asus is still the only company out there that is able to provide protected path audio. If that new Oppo bluray player was a little les expensive I would just give up on the idea of an HTPC. Its a great idea, but I suspect content providers are so paranoid the don't really want it to become a reality.

Isn't a new MOBO, video card and BR player for a PC, nearly the same cost as the OPPO?

Oppo BDP 83 = $600 cdn
BD drive + Radion 4665 = 205 cdn (don't need a new mobo)

Considering I still need to upgrade my receiver, its not worth the difference to me right now.

I missed the part of your original post about your present mobo. IIRC, I have the same one in my son's PC.

I think I would just keep saving pennies till I could afford the Oppo and not bother with the HT PC, then all you have to do is upgrade the receiver