Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HUD in stages

"I think I would just keep saving pennies till I could afford the Oppo"

Three times the price, but how much do I gain? I don't own any DVDs, so scaling is not a major requirement. SACD would be nice, but its a dead format. Johnk pointed out that the differences between HD audio and the compressed stuff is not that large.

For me, it dosn't seem worth it. Am I missing something?

If you're using a 4650 (or any modern 4xx0 series radeon) you do get the HD formats over the HDMI connection on the card. If I follow right, you don't have a receiver that does the decoding, though, right?

Good point Fred, I don't think you are missing anything as you are looking to use the higher bit rate compressed audio sent out along the optical out and not the HD Audio signal.

Yup. No HD decoding capability. Thats the 'in stages' part.

So you are saying that the 4650 would do HD audio passghrough?? I thought that DRM policy restriction would not let HD audio off the disc unless it verified protected audio path. I find this stuff confusing.

It appears to me that the 4650 does do HD audio as it looks for the DRM handshake, Ken seems to think so as well.

Yes, the 4650 does do HDMI, so by definition it does HDCP.

OK, according to this AVS forum thread the 4650 will bitstream HD over HDMI (whatever that means).

In another interesting twist, it looks like some of the players will send the audio stream through the windows mixer (where it gets downsampled/mangled) rather than forwarding to the receiver for decoding. Sigh.

On the upside, If I really really want direct access to the HD formats FFDshow seems to be able to bypass AACS/DHCP and slysoft is working on an audio player.

What fun.

Fred, you might want to look at this forum that CB919 mentioned in another thread. I only just started checking it out, but it seems to have an incredible amount of info there. This section seems like it would be just right for your questions.

Maybe worth a look.
http://forum.blu-ray.com/forumdisplay.php?f=35

This thread looks like it would pertain to your questions:
http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=99689

Fred, I thought only the Xonar card was a "one cable" solution. Are you saying that the 4650 will allow you to send BD video and HD audio over one HDMI cable?

Until my beer calls me, I sometimes read through the AVS "Building a HTPC" thread. I remember reading that you can get HDMI bitstreamed audio from a Nvidia 8200+ mobo and HDMI video from a separate Nvidia video card. That's a "two cable" solution, but I think it "works".

If you get this all figured out, make sure you let me know

You are (edit: almost) correct Tom. Its so damned confusing!! I rechecked the table in the AVS forum link i gave above and it will only bitstream DD and DTS over HDMI.

Edit: The 4 series ATI cards will do downconverted 16 bit 5.1 and 7.1 LPCM [sometimes]. You really need to read the table in the link I gave you. Downconversion is forced when PAP is not present.

THe Xonar is the only one cable HD solution. From what I read last night, the Xonar has its own driver related (read HDCP/PAP) issues.

I am quite certain that the Studios don't want anybody playing anything on their PC... ever. You don't even see any product anouncements for future support of PAP (protected audio path).