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.

Windows XP SP3 solves the HDMI audio problem

The OS I used when I built my own HTPC was Windows XP, it never be a problem to me as I hooked it to my LCD TV with a D-sub cable which obviously cannot carry audio signal. I used analog audio output instead. But, when I have a HDMI cable, naturally I would expect my TV's built-in speakers would sing but unfortunately it didn't!

I know HDMI is kind of digital stuff and it provides superior sound quality directly from the source to the speakers, in this case the PC was the source, the HDMI cable as the bridge and the TV's speakers as the audio device, but they just didn't work under Windows XP (SP2, to be exact). So I started searching around and found that it might be due to the Microsoft UAA (Universal Audio Architecture) Bus driver problem, I downloaded it and installed it numerous times but it still didn't work due to some reasons beyond my knowledge.

You know what? I solved it immediately when I installed the SP3!