DTS won't garble with HDMI

The best thing about having a receiver is you can get it does the decoding of the audio instead of the PC for you. As most of the popular audio codecs on the market are of Dolby Digital (AC3) and DTS, it would be great if our receivers could take over the decoding job from the PC and do it for us. The reasons are: (a) reduce the CPU usage and it would help a lot if you have a slow PC, (b) since your expensive receiver is already there for you, why not?

There are 2 ways to do it, first you need either a SPDIF optical cable (or Coaxial cable, but most of the PC boards do not have it) or a HDMI cable.

Steps:

1. At the FFDShow Audio Decoder, disable the codecs for AC3 and DTS.

2. Install Spdifer (or you can call it AC3Filter or whatever), tick 'AC3' and 'DTS' to enable the 'passthrough'.

3. Do not touch any other thing.

4. When you play a file with sound encoded in AC3 or DTS, your receiver should show "Dolby Digital" or "DTS" on the display screen. BUT...

5. Sometimes, the settings would only work for "Dolby Digital", but not "DTS". Instead you would find the DTS sound is garbled, as if it mutes or distorts every half second or so. The problem may be due to the bandwidth of the SPDIF.

6. The solution is HDMI, it will solve the problem.